


Burn This City

by lustmordred



Series: Meet Me in the City [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), captain america: the winter soldier - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-01 18:23:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 30,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6531052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lustmordred/pseuds/lustmordred
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one trusted Bucky Barnes these days. Bucky Barnes was in a position to compromise their star-spangled hero. Overall assessment of current threat level was therefore difficult to quantify. <i>Impending doom</i>, was Bucky’s analysis of his own current situation. He wondered how long he would have to wait until they came for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel to [Street Level Magic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2137356/chapters/4668408). I'm aware of what is in store for Tony Stark's character and his relationship with Steve in the upcoming movie. For the sake of this story and series, forget about all that though. Oh, and this story and series also disregards events in Age of Ultron, including the fact that Clint Barton has a family. He has no family here.

I got a tortured mind  
And my blade is sharp  
A bad combination  
In the dark

_\--The Black Keys (Sinister Kid)_

 

Recently acquired domesticity aside, most of the time Bucky was still the soldier. He had been the soldier a hell of a lot longer than he had been Bucky Barnes, and though Bucky’s memories ran deep and some of them had come to the surface as he passed his days—and nights—in Steve Rogers’s company, the soldier remained right there. So close you barely had to scratch the surface to find him looking back at you.

The soldier knew he was a captive even if his jailer didn’t know it. He regularly checked the rooms of Steve’s apartment for bugs and destroyed them, checked for cameras and did the same, and he almost never found them anymore. It was to be expected; every tiny microphone, chip and tiny camera he destroyed was costing someone somewhere a lot of money. Even clandestine spy organizations like those Fury had his fingers in couldn’t continue to rationalize the expense of such surveillance indefinitely.

It did not make them safe. Steve thought it meant they were safe when Bucky didn’t find anything hidden in the landline phone or tucked behind the fire alarm in the bedroom, but the soldier knew it meant no such thing. If it meant anything at all, it meant that they were coming down to the wire. It meant that a more lethal solution to the Winter Soldier problem would soon become necessary. Bucky put himself in Nick Fury’s shoes and he knew what Nick Fury would do if he couldn’t watch the soldier or listen to the soldier or in any other way track and monitor the soldier’s behavior; he would send operatives to kill the soldier. It was the most logical and expedient solution to the problem because the problem was trust and no one trusted Bucky Barnes these days. Bucky Barnes was in a position to compromise their star-spangled hero.

Overall assessment of current threat level was therefore difficult to quantify. _Impending doom_ , was Bucky’s analysis of his own current situation. He smiled just a little in the dark and wondered how long he would have to wait until they came for him.

The only logical reason why no one had yet been sent to neutralize the soldier was that his death also risked compromising Captain America. He had survived it once and remained strong because he had still had much reason to fight, but it was unlikely that he would continue to function in a normal and productive way if such a thing were to reoccur at this date and time. There were too many other stressors involved; time displacement, loss of all other social and familial attachments, culture shock and mild PTSD among the most obvious.

And betrayal. Steve would feel himself betrayed by the only people he viewed as his friends in this new century.

There was a very good chance that if Bucky were to be killed, Captain America would become useless to his country.

Neutralization of codename Winter Soldier therefore would require mitigating pretext.

Bucky tried to be afraid of dying and utterly failed. Fear was useful in the average citizen; it kept them alive. Fear was not useful in an operative like the Winter Soldier. Fear had been one of the first things to go in the scrap pile during his programming. He remembered fear, but he did not experience it.

Strike that. He remembered Steve on the helicarrier. Steve so earnest. Steve begging Bucky to know him, to remember him, to remember himself. _Don’t make me do this._ Fear had been inside him then. Followed by rage. Blind rage. But then fear again, still, fueling the rage… then tempering it. He hadn’t been afraid of anything in a very long time until Steve.

Bucky shifted in the chair where he was sitting, looking out the window into the nighttime city. In the glass his reflection looked back at him; unshaven jaw, long hair pulled back from his face, eyes dark and deep. In the next room, Steve was sleeping, blissfully oblivious to where Bucky’s mind was at.

Steve; the sleeping jailer. Bucky; the big, mean guard dog.

Steve seemed to be the only man alive who did not view their current living conditions in this manner.

SHIELD was dead, but at its heart HYDRA had thrived for a very long time. Long enough to teach SHIELD the way of turning one severed head into many more. Bucky didn’t trust Fury or his friends and agents, the Avengers, those people Steve Rogers now counted among his friends. They were the only ones who knew definitively that the Winter Soldier was alive and well, living with Steve Rogers in his D.C. apartment and someone had to have ordered the surveillance. Steve was a public figure though, and he considered that. Steve wasn’t just the scrappy kid from Brooklyn who was too dumb to know when to walk (or run) away from a fight anymore, he was a celebrity. He was Captain America, Avenger, protector of the world, a 21st century Lazarus.

Captain America occasionally ventured out in public with Bucky beside him. Bucky had taken to accompanying him on his daily run. Sometimes they went for walks, talking about the past or what was new in the world or what had changed or not changed. Mostly Steve talked about the past. Bucky’s past was bloody and painful. He had more of it between 1945 and the present than Steve did. They had both been put on ice, but Steve hadn’t had anyone to wake him, plug him in, program him with a mission, point him at the target and fire. They didn’t often talk about that though. It was possible—even likely—that there were others out there who knew that someone was secretly living with Steve when Bucky considered that 99.9% of everybody had a cell phone with a camera in it attached to their hand. Even possible that some of those people would have figured out who, no matter how unbelievable it might seem, that was.

So, perhaps it wasn’t Fury or one of his minions watching and listening. But it seemed most likely. Ockham’s razor was a truth he had often found merit in and it was, after all, the simplest answer.

Restlessly, Bucky stood and paced in front of the windows. He knew that in another life, he would have lit a cigarette and sat in the open window smoking it over the fire escape. Bucky had picked up a smoking habit in the military that he had not passed on to the Winter Soldier. The soldier had never had leisure time to develop such a useless habit. In another life he might have also lay in bed beside Steve when he couldn’t sleep himself until the sun came up. He would have watched him sleep and wondered what he dreamed about.

 _Do you think of me?_ he thought, aimless pacing becoming steps with more purpose. _Do you hear the wind howling like a wolf in your mind before you drift off? I do._

He found himself standing in the open doorway of the bedroom looking in at Steve with no clear memory of deciding to go there. He leaned against the doorframe and stared at Steve asleep on the bed. There was light outside filtering yellow and sickly through the thin white curtains, drawing golden lines through the blinds over Steve’s sleeping face. Over his back. Over the sheets and the mattress, across the floor to mere inches from the toe of Bucky’s left boot.

 _It’s a cold wind_ , he thought. _It’s a frosty alpine wind, Steve. It tastes just like adrenaline and snow and a little bit like you._

A ridiculous and sentimental idea, but very true all the same.

Perhaps it was different for Steve though. Perhaps Steve dreamed about Peggy Carter before he drifted off to dream. Young, beautiful Peggy with her crimson lips and her flashy scarlet dress. Peggy with a go to hell shine in her eyes and a gun in her hand, her aim true.

Either way, sad dreams to be sure.

But maybe Steve dreamed about other things. Puppies and footprints in the sand and the smell of leather and the Dodgers in May.

If Bucky could dream that way, he would have slept more than he did.

He knew that he should leave Steve. He had known it for a long time. Almost from the start. By staying with him, he forced Steve to make a choice; Bucky or everyone else. It wasn’t fair and Bucky had found himself caring about such things lately. At least regarding Steve. It was selfish to stay with him. Bucky had never been a selfless person though, not in any aspect; his heart rebelled against the idea even as his quick, efficient killer’s cruel mind calculated the cost and found it to be too great.

So far, his heart was still winning that debate.

~~*~~

It was still dark when Steve woke and he knew before he opened his eyes and stretched his hand out over the sheets beside him that they would be cold and that Bucky was gone. He got up and went to see if he was sitting up somewhere the dark of the apartment, but he already suspected what he would find. He was disappointed but not very surprised that Bucky wasn’t there.

He set the coffee pot to brew and went back down the hall to shower and change.

The past months had not been blissful, so it was a good thing Steve had never set himself up for domestic bliss; he would have doomed them from the start. He could hardly complain though. Whatever he had—whatever _they_ had—it was a hundred times better than the alternative. He’d lived through that alternative already, and though it had been brief, at least for Steve, it had cracked him open like a raw egg.

Still, when he woke up early before the sun had even begun to lighten the sky and found himself alone, Bucky slipped away quietly to God alone knew where, Steve couldn’t help feeling like it was all some monumentally cruel joke. The joke was on him. Here was Bucky, this stranger inside the body of the person he loved most in the world. This man, this soldier wearing Bucky’s face like a mask, his skin like a shroud, speaking with his voice… touching with his body. Was he even the man Steve had known at all anymore? He wasn’t alone in asking that question, he knew, but in the beginning, it had been easier to say yes.

He still believed it, and maybe he believed it mostly because he needed to, but then he’d ask himself, _Does it matter?_

No. It did not matter. He loved him still.

Bucky remembered most things now. He still wasn’t the same. He had fought their brainwashing and conditioning from the start. He had still been fighting it even after he’d been so destroyed by it all that he would lie docilely back, open his mouth and not fight the restraints. Inside, he was fighting. Left alone long enough, his memories returned and, like the rest of him, the serum that had made him like Steve accelerated the healing of his brain. So he was Bucky, but he was Bucky after seventy years of hell. After seventy years of experimentation and torture. Seventy years of being “the asset”, a tool that’s only major function was to kill as efficiently as possible. He had outgrown the man Steve had known as a boy.

Steve had rarely ever _wanted_ to kill anyone like he wanted to kill someone for all the damage that had been done to Bucky. He had killed before, but he believed in his heart that they had all been bad people and that he’d had no choice. If he could resurrect Zola or Pierce or any of the other faceless others who had manipulated and shaped Bucky into the Winter Soldier, Steve thought he might happily murder them all.

The scientists and agents who had kept Bucky all the years Steve was frozen and thought dead had twisted him, but they hadn’t unraveled him. The man who slept beside him was still Bucky, he was just Bucky washed up on the shore of the world after an apocalyptic storm. He’d had to evolve to survive. They had made him believe for years that he wasn’t even a person. He didn’t believe that anymore, but Steve still remembered how it was in the beginning after he found Bucky dozing outside his door.

There was no guidebook for this. There was no manual. He was feeling his way along in the dark, hoping not to step on a landmine.

The apartment smelled like coffee when Steve was finished with his shower. Through the door, he could hear the alarm clock across the hall beeping shrilly. He stood in front of the sink and wiped condensation off the mirror with the swipe of a hand. As he stepped up to the sink, he noticed a few long, dark hairs laying on the edge of the counter. There was more hair, a lot of it, in the little trashcan on the floor.

Bucky had cut his hair off at some time in the night. He sometimes did that when it got too long. He never cut it short, never went to a barber for a haircut, but when it got long enough that it became an annoyance, he would gather it into a ponytail with one hand, take up the scissors in the other and cut it off.

Steve found it charmingly eccentric of him, though he was aware most people wouldn’t see it that way.

He smiled to himself and brushed the few hairs off the sink into the trash with the rest.

He drank his coffee and ate eggs and toast sitting on a barstool at the counter while he thought about Bucky and wondered where he’d gone. Where did he go when he slipped out like this? He never left a note and he never volunteered to explain it when Steve saw him again. Steve had almost asked him before, but he always stopped and changed his mind. He wasn’t afraid of Bucky and Bucky would tell him, he was sure, if he asked, but he _was_ afraid. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know where Bucky went in the latest hours of the night.

It worried Steve that whatever it was, it might have something to do with HYDRA. Something left over from all the brainwashing, hypnotherapy, conditioning, sleep deprivation, torture and entire decades spent in cryogenic suspension. Steve was rarely surprised by how screwed up Bucky was. After some of the things Bucky had told him, he would have been more surprised if Bucky had easily bounced back from it all. So he worried that whatever was taking him out of the apartment in the middle of the night two and three times a week could be connected to that. Zola had done a real number on him. The tradition had been passed down once he was gone. It was not impossible that Bucky was still responding subconsciously to some sort of programmed or conditioned imperative buried deep in his mind and that scared Steve. If that was the case, did he really want to know?

Could Bucky still be out there taking assignments? Assassinating people?

Steve doubted it. It wasn’t that he didn’t think HYDRA capable of such insidious subterfuge; he knew better than almost anyone how capable they were. HYDRA wasn’t gone either. SHIELD was dead, but HYDRA survived out there somewhere still. They had become powerful by knowing when to bide their time. HYDRA knew how to play the long game. But if Bucky had still been their puppet, Steve would be dead. It wouldn’t even be difficult for him. All he would have to do was take him by surprise; move in close, hold him down like he sometimes did, then crush his throat with his unyielding inhuman hand when Steve leaned in for a kiss.

Bucky still hadn’t come home when Steve left to go for his run. He jogged downtown to the park and ran laps like he did most every morning until the sun rose and the sidewalks started to fill up with people. He met Sam and they ran together for a while, then they walked to a diner they liked, took a table in the back and ordered coffee. Sam also ordered oatmeal and fruit.

While they waited, he looked at Steve, who was gazing out the window at people passing by. “You doing all right?” he asked.

“Sure,” Steve said. He glanced over and caught Sam eyeing him doubtfully. He sighed. “I’m fine.” He shrugged. “You know how it is.”

“I know how it is,” Sam confirmed. “That’s why I ask. I mean, aside from the whole frozen for sixty-odd years time travel thing and brainwashed psycho boyfriend thing, I know how it is.” Sam cleared his throat and looked amused. “That’s why I ask.”

Steve huffed out a laugh. “ _Recovering_ brainwashed psycho,” he corrected. He sipped his coffee. “He’s recovering.”

“Right. So, is that recovering like you recover from pneumonia or recovering like ‘My name’s Bucky and I’m a recovering alcoholic’?” Sam asked.

“What’s the difference?” Steve asked.

“Alcoholics are always recovering,” Sam said. “They don’t ever recover.”

“Oh,” Steve said. He frowned and looked back out the window.

“I’m sorry, man. I didn’t mean to—”

“No. No, it’s okay.” Steve drank more of his coffee and made himself smile for Sam. Sam didn’t look like he was buying it, but he let it slide. “I never really went through the combat fatigue or uh… I guess it’s called something else now, but you know what I mean.”

“Post-traumatic stress disorder,” Sam said. “PTSD.”

“Right,” Steve said. “I never went home though, so I never had any _post_ anything. Neither did Bucky. Then what happened… well, happened. So I think maybe… I think maybe that’s all it is. Mostly. I mean, what happened to him, it’s got to be even worse than the war and the war was bad enough.”

“Something’s wrong though, huh?” Sam asked. He hadn’t touched his own coffee yet and it wasn’t steaming anymore. “Something’s going on or you wouldn’t be thinking about it and all distracted and shit like you are.”

“It’s nothing,” Steve said. “He just… He doesn’t sleep much. I mean, neither of us do, but he sleeps less. Sometimes he’s gone when I get up in the morning. I don’t know where he goes.”

“Maybe he’s just walking. You know, clearing his head,” Sam said. “Some guys have a hard time sleeping. Not just because of the bed being soft, but because of other things. You’re vulnerable when you’re sleeping. Anything can happen. Some guys have night terrors and nightmares and things, but some get insomnia.”

“You think that could be it?” Steve asked, hopeful.

Sam shook his head. “Hell if I know, but it’s possible. You ask him about it?”

“No.”

“You think he’d lie?”

“No, I just… I don’t know if I want to know.”

Sam raised an eyebrow at him. “What’s the worst it could be?”

“I don’t know.”

The waitress brought Sam’s breakfast and the conversation turned to other, less serious things after that. Sam asked about Peggy Carter and Steve said he should go visit her; it had been a while. Steve asked about Sam’s veterans group and Sam none-too-subtly hinted that Steve should attend. It might help.

Steve was willing to admit that it might, but he wouldn’t go, so he made no promises.

After breakfast, Sam had to go to work, so Steve caught a cab across town to the nursing home where Peggy lived. He bought flowers at a stand before he went in, purple daisies.

The nurse at the desk smiled at him sympathetically when he came in. “She’s sleeping,” she said. “She hasn’t been well.”

“All right. Can I just leave the flowers?” Steve asked. “I won’t wake her up.”

“Sure. It’s okay. If she wakes up, maybe…” The nurse shook her head. “She’d be sorry to miss you. She doesn’t have a lot of people.”

Steve nodded and went on down the hallway to Peggy’s room. The nurse was both right and not; if Peggy was in her right mind, she would be sorry she’d missed his visit, but if she wasn’t—as was the case more and more—she wouldn’t even know to miss him. If she wasn’t in her right mind, Steve was usually still dead to her and had been for seventy years. If she wasn’t in her right mind, Steve was someone she had mourned and put to rest.

He wasn’t quite sure which was better for her at this point.

He threw out the flowers he had brought her the last time—pink carnations that had dried up and started to turn brown around the edges—and replaced them with the daisies. Peggy was asleep on her back with her head turned toward the wall away from the window light. The curtains were drawn and the blinds were closed and she was a frail, quiet thing in the bed, a shallow silhouette of the vibrant woman he had known and loved.

He sat down in the chair by the window and looked at her. It made him sad and she seemed tired more often when he came to visit. She was not long for the world and he knew it. With her passing, one of the last few relics left still tethering him to the world he’d been born into would pass with her.

Looking at Peggy in the bed, smaller than he remembered, quiet and still and ancient, he sometimes experienced a surreal sensation of confusion and he wondered if it was anything like what Bucky felt when he said he sometimes caught himself looking at Steve, convinced that there was too much of him. Peggy had lived a life, from all accounts, a good, long life, but for Steve, that time was a snap of the fingers. For Steve, she had gone from being a beautiful, vivacious young woman, a force to be reckoned with, to a weary husk of a creature it hurt his heart to look upon, and it had happened in a blink.

It had to be strange to her as well. Steve gone, a hero dying too young, then in the twilight of her life, returned to her much, much too late, exactly the same. He was ninety-five and he was twenty-seven. She was dying now of old age and he was only really getting started.

Peggy made a soft sighing sound in the bed, an indrawn breath as she came awake, and turned her head on the pillow. Steve met her eyes and sat tensely, waiting to see which Peggy had woken up.

“You’re late,” she croaked, her voice raspier than usual with sleep. She smiled at him in that sweet, yet still sad way she always smiled at him when she first saw him. “Be a dear, Steve, and pour me a glass of water.”

Steve let out a breath, relieved that Peggy would not be crying. Peggy knew him, knew how he came to be there. She wouldn’t need to be soothed and that was good. He never wanted to upset her.

He went to the water pitcher on the table and poured her a glass of water.


	2. Chapter 2

The noir hero is a knight in blood caked armor. He's dirty and he   
does his best to deny the fact that he's a hero the whole time.

_\--Frank Miller_

 

Bucky didn’t go out for a couple nights and he tried to sleep. It was what normal people did. It was what he was supposed to do and he needed it. He knew that he needed it. He had slept sometimes in the past, but not much and not often. Mostly, he’d been placed in cryo, which wasn’t the same at all. There was really no comparison. It was more like he imagined death than it was sleep. In cryo, there was just numbing cold, the sucking blackness, then sometimes, rarely, there would be a sound. A word, a phrase. He had read somewhere that of all the senses, sound was the last one to go when a person died, so it was possible these were last words, last phrases, uttered by technicians and doctors before he died in the cold. Sometimes when they woke him again, months or years later, that word or phrase would still be echoing in the chamber of his mind, following him out of the darkness into the light.

_Turn off the lights before you leave, Stanley._

_Take it easy, we don’t want him to—_

_He’s down for the count, boss. Should we—_

_Goodnight, big fella._

_Billy, did you spill coffee over by the—_

_Sweet dreams, soldier._

_I always wanted to see Tahiti. I think it’d make the wife happy—_

He didn’t dream in cryo and that was both a curse and a blessing. Dreams were essential, Steve had told him that when Bucky first returned to him and he knew it was true. They took out the garbage, he had said. The problem with that was, Bucky had a lot of garbage backed up in his mind. He had shadows and shades, monsters and demons and he had been fighting them a long time.

In that way, the cryo chamber had almost been merciful.

In most of his dreams, they were coming for him. Coming to take him away. They would take care of all the garbage. All the garbage and everything else. Like a fire sale, everything would have to go. The garbage and everything that wasn’t. Steve and the price of baby dill pickles at the corner market. Steve and the little black dog that had barked at him from the back of a car as he crossed the 11th Street Bridge. Steve and way he laughed. Steve and the taste of black coffee. All of the garbage and everything that wasn’t garbage would be gone. That was what they were coming for.

They would take the residue of Bucky Barnes that he had scraped up out of the hollowed out husk of a man he’d been, out of the _asset_ , and salvaged and they would flush him away. They would clean and polish the husk then they would stuff it full of the Winter Soldier again. Steve would disappear from his memory and everything he’d become would be gone and his mind would be coated in ice again, filled with dark purpose, ready for new commands and new missions.

He’d had this dream before. In this dream, Steve died. In this dream, Bucky held the knife and the metallic shine of his fingers was obscured by still hot blood.

He woke with the echo of his screams fading all around him when Steve grabbed him. Bucky’s breath was labored, his heart was racing with panic and his first instinctive reaction to being held down and shaken was to lash out.

Steve tumbled off the bed onto the floor with a yelp of pain.

Bucky was out of the bed almost before he hit the floor and backing away. He withdrew into the deep shadows on his side of the bed until his back met the wall. From there he could see the entire room, every shadow and its origin, every vulnerability and every exit.

He assessed his surroundings and found them to be secure.

The only living thing in the room besides himself was Steve. The threat Steve posed to him was zero.

The windows on his side of the bed were an exposed hole in their defenses and he had pointed it out to Steve early on. In the event of a nighttime attack, it was the most likely point of entry. Steve would never consent to blocking them up or barring them though, which was why Bucky slept on that side of the bed; to protect him.

He turned his head and peered around the curtains out at the street below. There were a couple of people passing on the sidewalk below and a car pulling out of the garage of the building across the street. There was no clear and present danger.

False alarm.

Steve pulled himself up from the floor and looked at Bucky over the bed before getting to his feet. He was frowning, concerned, but also cautious. He rubbed his right side over his ribs and winced. “God, you hit hard. I’d almost forgotten.”

Bucky frowned at him. He had _not_ forgotten. He was making light of it to put Bucky at ease because Bucky had hurt him and he was… “Don’t be afraid of me,” he said.

“I’m not,” Steve said.

No hesitation; truth. “I’m sorry,” Bucky said. “Are you…?”

“I’m fine,” Steve said. “I mean, I will be. Are _you_ all right?”

Bucky looked around the room again, eyed the windows with displeasure and sighed. “Yes. I was dreaming,” he said.

“You were screaming,” Steve said. He sat on the side of the bed and after a minute, Bucky returned and sat with him. “Not saying anything, just… screaming. As you do.”

“I’m sorry,” Bucky said again. It seemed he should say something and there was nothing else to say. He raked his right hand through his hair, his brow furrowed, sad and thoughtful. “I’ll move to the couch.”

“You will not. You’ll lay back down and it’ll be fine,” Steve said. “It’s okay, really.”

Bucky looked doubtful, but when Steve pulled the sheets back and got back into bed, holding them up for him, Bucky got back into bed with him. He lay there staring up at the ceiling and he could feel Steve watching him. He could almost hear him thinking and he was being very loud about it.

“It was about you,” Bucky said after a while.

“Your dream?” Steve asked.

“Yeah. You were dead.”

“Oh. Well, I’m not dead. It was just a nightmare.”

“I killed you.”

Steve was silent for a little while and Bucky slid his eyes to the side to look at him, gauging his reaction to this news. Steve didn’t look alarmed and his vital signs did not indicate fear. He looked sad and resigned. Mostly sad.

“It was just a nightmare,” Steve repeated.

“Sure, Steve,” Bucky said.

They didn’t sleep anymore that night, though they didn’t get up until the sky got light enough that the street lamps went out and the birds gathered in the trees lining the sidewalk outside began to chirp. They didn’t talk anymore about the dream and Bucky thought Steve dozed a little, but never let himself slip fully back into unconsciousness. He got the impression from such behavior that Steve was more worried than he let on, that he was keeping an eye on Bucky, what Bucky had heard referred to often as _being there_ for him.

Steve kissed him before he started to get up and meant for it to be brief, but Bucky pulled him into it and kissed him deeply. He didn’t know much about thank yous, but he was grateful. Bucky had no one and, truth be told, no real interest in gathering more people around him to attach himself to, and Steve had only a few more people than Bucky and Bucky was one of those. He wasn’t used to needing people, but he needed Steve. Even if it didn’t help much. Even if it fixed nothing. Even if. Someone who saw him still as a person was a rare and beautiful thing.

Kissing Steve like that, his flesh hand in his hair where it had gotten long toward the back, his other hand cold on the small of Steve’s back, holding him and pulling him down against him so that the kiss demanded response from more of his body than his mouth, Bucky tried to make him understand. He didn’t have the words. He remembered that would not have been true before; Bucky Barnes had been a man of many words. Now he didn’t even know how to say the things he wanted to say, but he could trace them on the back of Steve’s tongue with his own and know he understood.

The world was a hard place. It always felt empty everywhere else he’d been, though it had never been more full.

Steve finally pulled out of the kiss and got up from the bed. There was a yielding weakness to his manner that let Bucky know that he could be convinced to stay. Convinced to do other things if Bucky were of a mind to push it just a little.

He decided not to and let him go.

“Breakfast?” Steve said.

His face was flushed and it made Bucky smile. Something around Steve’s eyes relaxed a bit at the sight. “Yes,” he said.

“Waffles?” Steve asked.

Steve had bought a waffle iron the previous month because he’d wanted waffles. The Eggo waffles he’d picked up at the grocery store had been an utter disappointment. He’d spent one Saturday morning three weeks earlier teaching himself how to use the appliance in his Quest for the Perfect Waffle. He had mastered the French press coffee maker in much the same fashion.

“Okay,” Bucky said.

Steve smiled. “Okay,” he said, mimicking him in a teasing way.

Bucky watched him walk out of the room and when he was gone he got dressed. He could hear Steve in the kitchen moving around as he walked down the hallway. The clatter of dishes and forks, then music on the radio. Steve liked Jazz. Bucky had no idea why.

There was a loud and abrupt knock on the front door and Bucky veered in that direction and opened the door. Standing on the stoop in the hallway between a table along one wall and the door that led to the stairs was a young guy with brown hair and glasses that Bucky had never seen before. He was wearing a blue polo shirt, carrying a messenger bag and he had a bicycle with him.

He looked Bucky directly in the eyes and Bucky glared.

“Steven Rogers?” 

Bucky eyed him suspiciously. “No.”

The kid smiled in a knowing and patronizing way that Bucky did not like. “Really? Because the guy downstairs said this was where I could find him.”

“Who is it?” Steve called from the kitchen.

“No one,” Bucky told him.

“Is that him?” the kid asked. He raised his voice to call into the apartment, “Mr. Rogers?!”

Bucky did not step out of his way and the kid did not quite dare try to force him. He kept (what he probably assumed to be) a safe distance between them. Bucky felt Steve come up behind him and then Steve was stepping into the doorway and Bucky was stepping back to let him, but still keeping his eyes on the young man with the bike. Steve smiled, puzzled by the visitor and strategically stood at an angle to place himself between him and Bucky.

Bucky inwardly scoffed, but he began to relax anyway. If he wanted to hurt the kid, he _would_ hurt him. Steve standing in his way would barely slow him down.

“Relax, Bucky, he’s just a mail courier,” Steve said. “Do you have something for me?” he asked the young man.

Grinning, the kid propped his bike against the wall and shifted his messenger bag on his shoulder. He recognized Steve, that was clear. His demeanor changed and Bucky’s eyes narrowed. The young man’s body language became slightly more tense, ever so slightly more aggressive and he reached into his messenger bag and quickly withdrew something.

Before waiting to see what it was, Bucky moved. He stepped by Steve, seized the kid’s wrist in his left hand, his throat in his right and slammed him against the wall outside the door. His metal arm made a low hissing sound of metal sliding over metal as his fingers clenched around the guy’s wrist. He thrashed and choked, eyes so wide they consumed his face.

“Holy—Bucky, don’t _kill_ him,” Steve said. He didn’t try to pull Bucky away, but he put a restraining hand on his shoulder and Bucky did relax his grip a little. “He’s not an enemy assassin or anything like that. For Christ sake, _look_ at him.”

Bucky did not waste his breath telling Steve that the very best assassins usually looked nothing at all like assassins. He released the boy’s throat. “What were you reaching for?”

The kid wheezed and coughed, rubbing his throat. “ _Reaching_ for? Man, I wasn’t… reaching for nothing. I got… You nearly fucking killed me!”

“No, I didn’t,” Bucky said. He looked along the kid’s arm to the hand he had restrained against the wall. “What is this?” he asked. He snatched it from his fisted hand without waiting for an answer and let him drop to the floor.

“It’s an envelope! Jesus, you know I could fucking sue you for—”

Bucky shifted his attention from the envelope and locked eyes with him. The kid paled and fell silent as he finished picking himself up off the floor.

The envelope was addressed to Steve. Bucky handed it to him.

Steve took it. “Look, I’m really sorry about this. You have to understand though, he’s ah… a veteran. PTSD, you know? And sudden movements can—”

“Dude, I don’t give a shit,” the kid said. He picked up his dropped messenger bag and took his bike. “I’m not gonna sue you, but you’ve been served.”

“Served?” Steve repeated. He looked down at the envelope in his hand, baffled. “Wait… what do you mean by—”

“It’s a summons. You are ordered to appear before a committee next Thursday morning at ten a.m. Read it,” the kid said. Then he left, pushing his bike along to the elevators.

Steve tore open the envelope and walked back into the apartment reading it. “Oh, no,” he muttered.

Bucky watched the courier leave and closed the door. “What is it?”

“The committee is made up of members of the Department of Defense and the World Security Council. They want to ask me questions,” Steve said.

“I thought they tried that already and you shut them down,” Bucky said. “Do that again.”

“I don’t know if I can.” Steve sighed and tossed the subpoena down on the counter. “Guess they’re finished cleaning up the mess after SHIELD collapsed. Now they want to investigate. They’ll be out for blood.”

Bucky scowled and crossed his arms. “Blood?”

“I mean people to punish,” Steve said. “It’s fine. I’ll go. Don’t worry. They can’t do anything to me.”

“They can try.”

Steve shrugged. He forced a smile, trying to lighten the mood again. “So, waffles. How many do you want?”

~~*~~

Steve actually was a little worried about the hearing. He didn’t know exactly what it was about, but he suspected it was something a little more serious than questions about SHIELD and HYDRA because they _had_ tried that already and he had refused and they hadn’t tried to force the issue. Something else had come up that they wanted to ask him about and there were only a few things that could be which would be serious enough to warrant a hearing before the DOD and the WSC.

The first thing that came to mind was Bucky.

They couldn’t _know_ about Bucky. There was no evidence connecting the Winter Soldier to Bucky Barnes and no reason for anyone to think that Bucky Barnes would even still be alive. Let alone in the fighting shape the Winter Soldier had been that day. Publicly, Bucky was dead. Even if he hadn’t fallen from that train in Austria in 1945, he would have been almost one hundred years old. The only file HYDRA or SHIELD had kept on him had been the hard copy Natasha had acquired that was now in Steve’s possession.

But they might suspect that Steve knew more than he was telling, mostly because he refused to talk about it.

Steve was a public figure and a bit of a celebrity, but he was a private one and even if some paparazzo had snapped a picture or some tourist had taken one with their cell phone of him with Bucky, it wouldn’t matter. Bucky barely looked like that man anymore. Even if he had still looked the same, no rational person would believe it was possible that he could be. He might be a great grand nephew or some sort of distant cousin, but it was impossible that he might be Bucky Barnes.

There wasn’t even anything that might lead to a celebrity scandal. Unless some intrepid paparazzo had scaled the wall of the apartment building and taken pictures through the venetian blinds into the bedroom, it was impossible. Steve was from a time and generation of people that did not like to air their private business in public. He had never kissed Bucky on a street corner or held his hand at an outdoor café. He probably never would.

Even if he had, it was far from illegal in this strange time.

Even if by some miracle they believed Bucky was alive, Steve had a difficult time imagining how the government would deal with such a thing. Here was a man who had been a hero to his country, who had been captured in battle and experimented on then returned to the fray rather than return home, who had been captured a second time by the enemy and assumed dead, held prisoner and essentially tortured for nearly seventy years by an organization growing right under their noses at the heart of the department that was most responsible for the security of the nation. This man, this war hero, had been posthumously given the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration in the land, for outstanding bravery in action. His name was on the Wall of Valor. Senators and congressmen had attended his funeral, where they had buried an empty casket with all ceremony. If it came to light that he was the assassin known as the Winter Soldier, there would be a hell of a lot of explaining to do.

So why was he worried?

“Can we listen to something else?” Bucky asked.

Steve was sketching in a small hardbound sketchbook Sam had bought him several months earlier and he looked up from the drawing he was doing—Bucky sitting in a chair by the window looking down at the street, the natural light outside bright on his face. Bucky had his shirt off because he’d gone downstairs earlier to the gym on the first floor and spent an hour punching bags, taken a shower when he returned and not bothered to put another shirt on. He was sprawled in the chair in a way that managed to be both lazy and alert. It made Steve think of a big cat in a zoo; capable of speed and unimaginable destruction, but dozing on the rocks while mommies and daddies held their children tighter by the hand.

Steve wondered if the reason Bucky hadn’t moved from the spot to change the radio station himself was because he had realized what Steve was doing. “You don’t like this?” he asked.

Bucky shook his head. “I hate this.”

Steve grinned. “Well, what do you want to listen to then?”

“Something else,” Bucky said.

Steve laughed and went to change the music. He turned the tuning dial until Bucky lifted a hand signaling him to stop. It was a rock station, the song “The Unforgiven” by Metallica. Steve wasn’t surprised, though that particular song was a lot more mellow than what Bucky typically liked to listen to. Bucky had a taste for some of this century’s heavier rock music when left to choose for himself.

He returned to his seat on the couch and finished his drawing and Bucky sat for him until he was done. When Steve put the sketchbook aside, Bucky got up to look and Steve anxiously stood by while he stared down at the picture. It was hard to read Bucky these days even when he was at his most emotional. As he looked down at the drawing Steve had done, his expression was unreadable.

“Um… I don’t draw people very much,” Steve said. “It’s not that great, I guess, but I—”

Bucky shifted his gaze to Steve and raised an eyebrow at him. “It’s nice,” he said simply.

Steve smiled, relieved. Bucky didn’t get upset about such trivial things, but he liked that he liked it. “Yeah?”

Bucky closed the book and set it down on the table. “Yeah,” he said.

Steve stepped toward him and Bucky eyed him knowingly and smiled faintly as he drew near. The phone rang and Steve froze.

“Ignore it,” Bucky said. He put his arm around Steve’s waist and pulled him back, pulled him against him. “They’ll call back.”

Steve wanted to ignore it and he swayed toward Bucky, thinking that was exactly what he was going to do, but the phone kept ringing and ringing. “It might be important,” he said.

“It’s not,” Bucky said.

His hand ran slowly up Steve’s spine beneath his shirt and Steve nodded, a shiver following the petting of his fingers up his back. The phone stopped ringing and he sighed, only to huff out an annoyed breath when it immediately began to ring again.

“Just let me answer it and it’ll stop then we can… you know, get back to… this,” Steve said. He felt himself blush as he stumbled over that, even now not able to say aloud what _this_ was.

Bucky’s lips curved in a slow, amused smile and Steve looked away, flustered, but also pleased. He could do that to Bucky, get that reaction from him, and it was a powerful thing.

The phone started ringing again. “ _Jeez_ ,” Steve said under his breath. “I’m going to answer it,” he told Bucky. “I’ll just… tell them to call back.”

Bucky let him go and Steve went to the phone and picked it up, cutting it off mid-ring. “Hello?”

“Why the hell aren’t you answering your phone when I call, Captain?”

It was Nick Fury. Steve frowned down at the table and stared at the phone cradle. “I was busy,” he said. “Is something wrong?”

“You tell me,” Fury said. “I hear you got subpoenaed.”

“You heard that where?” Steve asked.

“Come on, Cap. I hear things,” Fury said.

Which did not in any way put Steve at ease. Probably Fury’s intent. “Yes, I got a subpoena. I’m supposed to appear at a hearing next Thursday morning. Why do I get the feeling you already know about this though?”

“They might try to ask you about me,” Fury said instead of answering him.

“Okay,” Steve said. “I figured they might.”

“They can’t know I’m alive, Captain. Not yet. I’ve still got business to take care of and it’s too dangerous.”

Steve ran his tongue over the back of his teeth thoughtfully and said, “If everyone thinks you’re dead, I don’t know why they’d want to ask me about you in the first place. But fine, I’m not going to say anything.”

“They can’t know about your friend right now either, you know,” Fury said. “It would ruin you.”

Annoyed, Steve said, “You think I don’t know that? I know that. What do you _want_?”

“Just be smart, Steve,” Fury said.

On that vaguely threatening note, the phone went dead in his hand. Steve slammed it back down and glared at the wall.

“What is it?” Bucky asked.

“Nick Fury doesn’t want me to talk about him. Or you, I suppose,” Steve said. “I don’t really know what he wants, actually. He just—” Steve made a low sound of frustration in his throat.

“I really should have shot him in the head,” Bucky said. He said it so casually that Steve turned his head to look at him. He was gazing thoughtfully up at the ceiling. “He’s bad at minding his own business for a dead man.”

He was, but Steve also didn’t think Fury had warned him about mentioning Bucky at the hearing because he gave a damn about Bucky. In Nick Fury’s mind, Bucky was living with Steve under his watch, being guarded by him. Bucky was the Winter Soldier and he would always be the Winter Soldier, prisoner, but also a potential asset. As a weapon, certainly, but more than that; as a source of information. Except the Winter Soldier was a tool that had been proven to malfunction and that would have to be weighed against any value he might have as an asset. He was no more human to Nick Fury than he had been to HYDRA. If the U.S. government found out about Bucky, he would be lost to the likes of Nick Fury.

Everyone still saw Bucky as a pet Steve had taken in, not to keep, but to foster.

“You can’t kill Nick Fury,” Steve said, because he could see Bucky thinking about it.

Bucky glanced at him. “Of course I can. It would be remarkably easy and he’s already supposed to be dead so no one would even notice.”

“People would notice,” Steve said, walking back toward him across the room. “Agent Hill would notice, Banner and Stark would notice. Natasha would notice.”

Bucky did not shrug, but he didn’t have to. The list of people—all very dangerous, highly capable people in their own right—who would mourn the second death of Nick Fury did not impress him in the least. “You don’t want me to kill him,” he said.

Steve put his hands on Bucky’s shoulders and looked him in the eye. “No, I don’t.”

“It would be more prudent to let me kill him,” Bucky said. He put his arms around Steve’s waist and walked him backward toward the hall. “But I won’t.”

 _For now_ , went unspoken, but Steve still understood it was what he meant. It was not a promise to let him live forever, merely a guarantee that he could go on living for today. When and if Nick Fury became a genuine threat, Steve had no doubt that Bucky would find him and remove that threat. He had changed a lot in the past months, but he was still the same in a lot of ways; he was still the soldier deep down, but now he had something to lose and a life to protect. It made him more dangerous in some ways rather than less.

“Good,” Steve said. He felt the doorknob to the bedroom door pinch into his back and reached back to push the door open, walking backward toward the bed. “He’s just making phone calls and threats. It’s not important enough to kill people.”

“I said I won’t kill him,” Bucky said. He pulled off Steve’s shirt and gently pushed him so he would fall back on the bed. “I won’t as long as all he does is make phone calls and threats.”

“Okay,” Steve said.

Bucky crawled up the bed over him, kissed his shoulder then lightly nipped it when Steve caught his breath. “I should draw your picture more often,” Steve said, laughing softly.

“If you want to,” Bucky said.


	3. Chapter 3

Do we simply stare at what is horrible and forgive it?  
Here is the river, and here is the box, and here are  
the monsters we put in the box to test our strength   
against.

_—Richard Siken_

 

Steve did draw him again later that night while Bucky lay stretched out and sleeping on the bed. He fell asleep with the lamplight shining red on his eyelids and the sound of Steve’s pencil scratching paper beside him. He was naked, the sheet low around his hips, the window behind him cracked to let in the breeze, which blew through the tips of his hair and made it tickle on his cheek. Bucky watched Steve through slitted eyes for a while, dozing. Steve had put pants on, sweats that he sometimes slept in, and sat cross-legged on his side of the bed with the sketchbook in his lap, a look of concentration on his face that made Bucky smile.

It put him at ease enough that Bucky felt he could really sleep for a while. Just for a while though; he had somewhere else to be later.

Just as he allowed himself to slip off to sleep, the phone rang again. Steve picked it up before it could ring a second time, worried about it disturbing him, but before he went to sleep, Bucky still thought they might have to talk later about changing the number.

When he woke up, it was after midnight and Steve was curled up beside him sleeping. The window was closed and the lamp was off. The sketchbook and pencil Steve had been using were on the nightstand.

Bucky moved quietly around the room, got dressed, took his keys and left the apartment, locking the door behind him. On his way out, he searched the building for potential threats; loiterers, people out of place, homeless vagrants that no one chased away. There was no one. Steve would be safe for a few hours.

Bucky walked east. After a few blocks, he noticed that he was being followed and circled back, slipped into an alley and watched. When Steve walked past the mouth of the alley, Bucky grinned. Steve had followed him. Bucky hadn’t been as quiet as he believed or else Steve hadn’t actually been sleeping, he had been waiting to follow him.

It both amused and pleased Bucky—Steve was not helpless and he knew that, but it was sometimes reassuring for Steve to prove it to him. He knew that he could handle himself in a fight, in a battle, but such people could still be killed on the street. No matter how patronizing it might be, Bucky was _proud_ of him. He still wasn’t going to let Steve follow him.

He waited ten minutes and when Steve didn’t retrace his steps, Bucky left the alley and walked quickly in the opposite direction, going west instead of east. He turned a corner at the end of the street and approached a bus stop just as the bus was pulling up to it. He took the bus to the east side of the city, got off a mile from his destination and walked the rest of the way.

Bucky made fifteen hundred dollars that night in a fight against a wiry Asian man less than half his size. He also got his right eyebrow split open against the concrete wall and went home dreading the look on Steve’s face when he saw it in the morning and the conversation that was likely to follow. He hadn’t killed the little Asian guy and he had to respect him for his ability to get inside Bucky’s guard like he had, but he hadn’t been pleased about it either. It wasn’t the pain—he barely felt it—it was the problem that such a wound presented for him.

He would simply have to lie, he decided, and began formulating one immediately as he made his way back home.

It did occur to him to tell Steve the truth, but he had considered that option before and dismissed it long ago. Bucky wasn’t killing people anymore, but he was fighting in the pits for fun and money and Steve would not like it. They were both violent men, but Steve was only violent when he had to be, only because it was necessary to defend and protect and stand up for what was right and true and good. Bucky had once done the same, but he’d never had Steve’s conviction and so he had always been a weapon others pointed at the target. He’d done it for Steve, he’d done it for his country, but he had done it for himself, too, because he liked it. He could not see Steve accepting violence and brutality as recreation. Whereas Bucky… well, he hadn’t been a sniper in the army because he was good at diplomacy and liked to cuddle. He had been the Winter Soldier a long time and even now, he was the Winter Soldier and the Winter Soldier was him. Without a place to release the pent up rage and violence, he would have gone mad(er) and he knew that because at first after he returned to Steve, he’d been restless and his grip on the world and who he was sometimes slipped, his temper flared, his knee-jerk reaction to insignificant things was to kill. He couldn’t live a life that way.

But what to do about the cut on his face? There was no chance that Steve would fail to notice it. Steve was very aware of Bucky whenever he was with him. Part of this was that he still carried a little nagging grain of worry inside him that it was all a big practical joke. That he had been tricked and any minute he was going to realize that Bucky wasn’t there, that he had never been there at all.

He sometimes wondered what it had been like for Steve trapped for nearly seventy years in the ice. Was it like cryo? Had he dreamed? Had life in some fashion continued gamely on in Steve’s subconscious all those years? Or had it been like dying? Dying for seventy years but never actually being dead. Was it all as confusing to Steve as it was for Bucky? If so, he hid it well. He always seemed, more than Bucky did, to know what was going on and what happened next.

He wasn’t killing people though. If Steve asked and he was forced to tell him the truth, at least there was that. Steve would forgive him for it if that were the case, but it would tear him up. He knew about the people Bucky had killed in service to HYDRA: more than two dozen targeted kills, hundreds of collateral kills. Bucky wasn’t sorry about any of them, not really. They were not real to him as people. They were still numbers, missions, tally marks. They were paper and ideas and tiny figures at the end of a scope or faces in a newspaper. He had always been able to distance himself from such things, to compartmentalize, and it made him a skilled killer both on and off the battlefield, a wonderful piece of clay for Zola to mold and shape. And Steve had forgiven him for it all. He cared about all of those people, about those numbers and the lives they represented and still he forgave Bucky. He would forgive him again.

The thing was, Bucky didn’t want to ask him to.

He thought he would probably tell Steve he fell down. He tripped over… something… someone?... and hit his head on—No. Steve wasn’t stupid and he wouldn’t believe that. Bucky was not clumsy, he did not fall down for no reason or trip over his own feet.

He was attacked? No. That would only make Steve suspicious and fretful. He would watch the news obsessively looking for mention of a body stuffed in a dumpster down an alley with its head caved in.

He could refuse to explain it at all, but that would make things worse rather than better. Worry Steve without providing him anything specific to be worried about.

Frustrated, Bucky dragged his hands through his hair. Then he tied it back with the band he’d been carrying around his wrist.

He was bad at this. At this normalcy. This domesticity. If Steve had been a handler demanding debrief he could have easily complied, but this was… difficult.

Bucky walked back across the bridge and through the city to the apartment building. It was a long walk, but he didn’t mind it. It gave him time to think and he wouldn’t have been sleeping if he had been home anyway.

The sun was coming up when he got there and Bucky expected Steve to be up and out on his run. He liked to get started early, usually before the sun came up, and watch it rise. But Steve wasn’t out. He was sleeping on the couch, dressed in jeans, a shirt and a hooded sweatshirt, leaning back against the arm of the couch like he had tried to sit up waiting for Bucky and fallen asleep on watch.

Bucky regarded him thoughtfully for a minute. Then he quietly slipped down the hall to the bathroom, stripped and got into the shower. He washed his hair, scrubbed the sweat off and just before he stepped out of the bathtub, he scratched the softened scab off the cut on his eyebrow and got it bleeding anew.

When he returned to the living room, Steve was awake and the television was on. Steve was watching Kathie Lee and Hoda while he waited for Bucky.

Bucky dabbed at the cut over his eye with a wadded up piece of toilet paper and sat down beside him.

“You’re bleeding,” Steve said. “What happened?”

“Slipped in the shower,” Bucky said. “It’s fine.”

“Let me see,” Steve said. He sat turned toward Bucky and reached over to pull his hand away from the cut so he could look. “Wow, you must have hit your head pretty bad. There’s a bruise. Are you okay?”

“It’s nothing,” Bucky said.

“I don’t know, it might scar,” Steve said.

Bucky shrugged.

“I should get some of those no slip stick-on things for the bathtub,” Steve said.

Bucky smiled faintly and pressed the toilet paper to the cut again. “If you want.”

He had noticed Steve taking an interest in such frivolous things lately. It was because he was happy and that pleased Bucky. Out there in the world, Steve could fight monsters and aliens and the very worst conspiracies, but he was little by little settling into the apartment like he intended to remake it into a home. A safe territory with milk glass cups and slip resistant stick-ons in the bathtub shaped like frogs. Dark curtains so Bucky could stop thinking about someone shooting through the glass. Waffle irons, French press coffee pots, microfiber comforters, DVDs of iconic films spanning the decades between 1945 and 2015, all the books neither of them had ever had time to read. All things that said this place was safe, a refuge. It made him happy and indicated a level of contentment that had been absent before.

If Steve wanted to drag Bucky to flea markets and antique stores, he would go and he wouldn’t complain. If Steve wanted to spend all day in Bed Bath & Beyond picking out bath towels and picture frames, Bucky would accompany him and push the cart. So far, he hadn’t suggested such a thing, but Bucky didn’t count it out as a possibility in the future at this rate.

“Where did you go?” Steve asked.

Bucky frowned at the TV and didn’t say anything for a little while. Steve waited him out and he didn’t take back the question, though he did shift nervously beside him.

“I walk a lot at night,” Bucky finally said. “I can’t sleep, so I walk. It’s… You don’t have to worry about it.”

“Okay,” Steve said. He wasn’t smiling anymore though. “We could see a doctor. Maybe get you something to help you sleep. If you want to.”

Bucky shook his head. “I’d still dream,” he said. He was adding spice to the lie by sprinkling it with truth and he experienced a pang of guilt about that. But he brushed it off. “I’ll sleep later. It’s not as bad in the day.”

“All right,” Steve said. He still didn’t seem like he believed him completely, but Bucky didn’t press the issue. If he pushed it, the lie would unravel. “I tried to follow you last night.”

Bucky glanced at him and raised an eyebrow. “Did you?”

“I lost you though,” Steve said, nodding. “It was… strange. You just disappeared. Did you see me?”

“No,” Bucky lied. “You shouldn’t follow me though.”

“Why not?”

“You need your sleep.”

Steve breathed out a soft, dismissive laugh. “Right, and you don’t, I guess.”

Bucky didn’t reply to that. He didn’t need much sleep, but he needed it about as much as Steve did and he didn’t get enough. He wasn’t going to dwell on it though. There was nothing to do about it unless he was willing to lie down and let the shadows have at him. If he was exhausted enough, they didn’t come. He went to sleep and everything was black nothingness and that was better. If he slept the way Steve did, Bucky would have been a total wreck.

Steve went to visit with Sam later that day and Bucky did finally take a nap around noon. He was so exhausted by the time he lay down, he closed his eyes and went straight to sleep, which was how he liked it. No shadows, no dreams—good or bad—and no memories leaking into his unconscious mind. At least none that he could later recall. It was blackness that gave him peace. The dark was simple that way.

When Steve got home that afternoon, he brought pizza for dinner and they watched a movie while they ate. Something called _Dirty Dancing_. Neither of them liked it very much, but Steve told him that Sam had said he _had_ to see it. It was iconic, he said. Very important to pop culture.

Steve put in another movie when it was over— _Dracula_ —and stretched out on the couch to watch it with his head in Bucky’s lap. He fell asleep before it was over, but Bucky left the TV on and let it play all the way through to the credits at the end.

Steve went to bed then. He asked Bucky to join him, but Bucky said he would come in later and Steve went to bed alone, frowning with disappointment.

Bucky sat up in the chair by the window in the living room and wondered if Steve meant to follow him again when he left. He waited several hours for Steve to fall asleep then went to check on him just to be sure.

Steve lay curled up on his side of the bed with his pillow pulled under his chin and held tightly. He stood in the doorway and watched him for a while, but Steve didn’t wake up, his breathing was soft and even, his resting heartbeat didn’t skip a beat.

Satisfied, Bucky left the apartment and walked east.

The warehouse where they hosted the fights had been converted to better suit the needs of the people. The building had once had a basement, but part of the floor had been removed to create an eight foot drop into a pit. This was where the fights happened. There were several levels of benches like bleachers built up around the pit, looking down into it, a second floor had also been converted to allow for a balcony-like vantage point overhead. Bucky knew from experience that the best seats in the house were either right there next to the pit or way up there above it. Those close to the pit were taken early by bookies and people crowding close to place bets and shout down to the fighters.

Bucky took the steps down into the pit. A few people looked around and watched him, but he wore a hooded sweater and kept his head down as he descended the stairs. There were fights ahead of him, marked on a blackboard in the back near the shower room. There were two empty timeslots though, the first fight and the last. Bucky chose the last and went into the back to wait.

There was a table back there outside the showers, pushed into a dark corner near the furnace, and four guys he had seen at the fights before were seated around it playing cards. Bucky checked his watch then went to stand against the wall and watch them play. The first fight was in five minutes.

“Goddamn it, Phil, I know you’re fucking bluffing me,” one of the guys said when Phil raised him ten more dollars.

Bucky glanced over at Phil’s cards and the ones on the table. Phil was not bluffing. He had a Jack and an eight, which would give him a flush.

“Put your money where your mouth is then, we ain’t got all fucking night,” Phil said.

The other guy sighed, slapped his cards down on the table and pushed back from it to stand. “I fold then. Lemme see your cards.”

Phil put his cards down with a smile and gathered up his money.

“Ah, hell.”

A thin man with a mustache wearing a ratty white T-shirt came into the back. “You guys are up in a minute. Get ready,” he said, pointing to Phil and one of the other men.

He glanced uneasily at Bucky, who looked calmly back at him.

“Don’t you fucking maim nobody tonight,” he told Bucky. “I like your style, Barnes, but you kill a guy in here and we’re all in a whole lotta shit.”

Bucky raised an eyebrow at him. “I have not killed anyone in all this time, Teddy.”

“Yet,” Teddy said. “I’m just saying… You know what I’m saying. That guy last week, you fucking dislocated his arm.”

Bucky smiled faintly. “Yes, I know what you’re saying,” he said. “I also put his arm back in.”

Teddy made a dismissive snorting sound and stalked back out into the pit. A minute later they all heard his voice raised to get everyone’s attention, welcoming them to the pit and introducing the first fighters.

“You want to play?” one of the men still at the table with the cards asked Bucky as their two friends got up to leave.

Bucky looked between them and the cards being shuffled then took Phil’s seat with his back to the wall. “It’s been a long time since I played poker,” he said. “I might be a little rusty.”

They dealt him in and Bucky listened to the fight beyond the room and Teddy’s commentary—he fancied himself a real showman—and lost thirty dollars in the first couple hands. He won the next hand with three of a kind, aces over tens, and made back the thirty plus five.

The first fight ended; the guy called Phil had lost.

“Guess I’m up,” one of the others said as the first two staggered back to the showers.

There weren’t enough people around the table anymore for a decent game of poker so Bucky leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, listening to the fight and the sounds of the crowd. The meat-packing sound of heavy blows, the slap of flesh against concrete, the baseball in a glove sound of a man turning his head to spit blood, the jeering and screaming. Bucky had never fought before a real audience before he came to this place and at his first fight he had been a little thrown by how loud it could get in the closed in space of the warehouse. It hadn’t distracted him though. He was used to fighting multiple people at a time under far more distracting conditions. It was a novel experience to hear people cheer when he slammed his fist into another man’s face.

He didn’t love the crowd the way he knew some fighters did. He wasn’t addicted to their adulation. He recognized and understood the appeal though. Still, he played to the crowd, gave them a show and sometimes even took a beating to make it look good. It wouldn’t have been much fun to bet on him if he hadn’t.

Bucky didn’t move again until it was close to his turn. One of the other men tried to rouse him when he returned from winning his own fight, thinking Bucky had, of all things, dozed off. He let him think it and stood, stripped off his sweater and his shirt beneath it and pulled the elastic band from his hair and finger-combed it back.

There was a brief timeout between fights for bets to be placed and money exchanged. Bucky waited a minute just beyond the pit and watched the activity. His opponent stood ready for him already in the pit, smiling, looking up at the people staring down at him. He was a big man, muscled, heavy, a couple of inches taller than Bucky and broader through the chest. His head was bald and there was a tribal pattern tattoo on it that ran down his shoulders to his biceps.

Bucky stepped out of the shadows into the light cast down into the pit and the noise from the crowd rose as people saw him and recognized him. Not as Sergeant Barnes or the Winter Soldier, but as the fighter many of them had come here hoping to see.

His opponent raised his arms, welcoming the cheers, and grinned around at the staring faces. Bucky did not. He eyed the other man and took his measure.

He was fit and strong, but not as fit and strong as he believed himself to be. His strength came from weightlifting, running laps and playing basketball. He could win in a fight against most men and had likely won his share because of the sheer size of him, but the way he carried himself indicated little to no real combat training or discipline. Bucky could not recall seeing him in the pit before, which did not mean he hadn’t been there before, but the way he looked around and the broad, arrogant way he smiled made Bucky think not.

Teddy hit a bell on the wall, signaling them to fight.

The tattooed man turned toward Bucky and started toward him. Bucky was still, watchful. When the tattooed man swung, he stepped back almost casually out of the way. He swung again with his other hand, Bucky turned away from the blow, caught his arm and used his own momentum to flip him.

The tattooed man was not smiling anymore when he got to his feet.

Bucky stood in the middle of the pit while his opponent circled him, tracking his movements without turning to face him. He rushed him and Bucky stepped aside, slammed his elbow back into his face, turned and kicked him. He staggered back and Bucky followed, hit him in throat, which made the tattooed man choke and retch, then swept his feet out from under him.

He rolled immediately to his knees and got up, gasping for breath, but determined. He swung and Bucky blocked it, but he kicked out and he didn’t quite get out of the way in time. The blow caught him in the side and knocked the wind out of him a little. He didn’t fall and he didn’t stagger, but he had to back away while he caught his breath.

The tattooed man laughed and took advantage of the momentary weakness to rush him again. They exchanged blows, Bucky hit him in the face, he hit Bucky in the shoulder, the tattooed man grabbed him, Bucky grabbed him back and their arms locked. They stood facing each other, their arms caught together, neither able to break the hold (at least not without breaking the man’s arm). The tattooed man grinned and his teeth were stained with blood.

He tried to head-butt Bucky, but when he did, Bucky lowered his own head and caught the blow against the hard crown of his skull. There was a crunch. The tattooed man cried out and fell backward, clutching his bleeding nose.

The fight was over soon after that. Bucky’s opponent tried to stay in it and keep fighting, but he was done after that. He managed to hit Bucky a few more times, Bucky slammed him back into a wall, but he had to put the man down on the floor with his fists in the end.

When he tapped out at last, Bucky instantly stopped. His pulse was like a drum beating in his chest, in his throat, he could taste adrenaline in his mouth along with the blood from his split lip, the screaming, cursing, cheering crowd was a white noise nothingness that was almost soothing. His blood was up, pumping fast, the thrill of battle still on the tips of his fingers making him shiver.

“Fuck, man,” the tattooed man said, groaning as he painfully got up from the floor. He gestured at Bucky’s left arm. “That shit shouldn’t be allowed.”

Bucky licked blood off his bottom lip and lifted his head, swiping his hair back from his face as his eyes drifted up to people looking down at him.

They landed on Steve.

Steve stood there by the railing staring down into the pit at him, his eyes wide, his mouth hanging slightly open in surprise. Bucky couldn’t hear him when he spoke but he could read his own name on Steve’s lips.

With a resigned, sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach, Bucky wiped a hand across his mouth and turned his head to spit the blood that had filled his mouth from where he’d bitten the inside of his cheek. Then he turned his back on Steve and everyone else and stalked back to the showers to wash the blood and dirt off before he had to explain it all to Steve. It wasn’t going to be easy. He had a pretty good idea of how that conversation was going to go.


	4. Chapter 4

Evil are the demons that haunt you  
Forgetting what it was that they taught you  
And now there's no one left to stop you  
Or to catch you when you drop

_\--The Builders and the Butchers_

 

Steve didn’t yell at him or lecture him or say much of anything until they got home. He wasn’t sure how to start such a discussion, and he would have to start it because Bucky hadn’t said a word other than, “Hello, Steve,” before they left the warehouse.

The warehouse where Bucky apparently went when he left in the middle of the night. The warehouse where he beat people up _for fun_. Where he beat people up _for money_. For… well, probably for other reasons that Steve had yet to consider that were a lot harder to understand.

He didn’t even know where to start. He didn’t want to shout and he didn’t want to be a nag and Steve was one of the few people in the world who did not want to control Bucky and did not have some kind of agenda. But hurting people for _recreation_ did not sit well with him at all. It was wrong. Bullies and villains hurt people for the fun of it or for money. It went against everything Steve stood for to take advantage of his superior abilities to harm others for no significant reason. Bucky was not Steve, especially not now, but Steve had believed that Bucky, even as he was now, would think such a thing was beneath him.

They were violent people. They had always been violent people. But they did it for good reasons. They did it when they had to. When there was no choice.

It wasn’t a _game_.

He was pretty sure he was going to figure out how to say all of this to Bucky, but Bucky didn’t really give him a chance to.

Once inside the apartment with the door closed, Bucky took his sweater and his shirt off and tossed them over the back of a chair. Then he was pushing Steve’s jacket off and pulling his shirt over his head and Steve was trying to figure out a way to say it _right_ while also extricating himself from Bucky’s hands.

“Bucky, will you…” Bucky backed Steve over to the doorway into the hall and opened the button of his fly. “Bucky… Okay, stop it, we are having this conversation.”

“Later,” Bucky said. He pulled Steve away from the wall and kissed him. “We’ll talk about it later, Steve.”

“What? No. We… We’re talking about it _now_ , Buck,” Steve said. He turned his head to the side as Bucky was kissing him. Then he sighed as Bucky merely moved his mouth to the side of his neck. “I’m serious. And we’re doing it with our pants _on_.”

That made Bucky laugh, but it didn’t deter him in the slightest. When Bucky knelt at his feet to finish pulling his zipper down, Steve finally understood that he meant to have his way and he meant to have it right there on the living room floor.

“Bucky, _no_ ,” he said, and grabbed his arm to pull him back up. “No. I’m not… We’re not doing this here. If we’re doing this, we’re doing it in the bed.”

Bucky grinned and it made something flutter low down in Steve’s belly. Bucky didn’t smile like that much these days and he only did it now for Steve.

“Why?” Bucky asked.

“Because… Because it’s…” He found himself unable to come up with a reason other than because he didn’t want to and the idea of going at it like animals in rut on the living room floor was embarrassing. “Because I don’t want to. Oh, and because the… the stuff’s in there.”

“The stuff” was lube, which they now had, though Steve never bought it. Bucky always had to.

Still grinning at him, Bucky leaned in and kissed him. Steve could feel how hot his face was and it was amazing it didn’t glow in the dark.

“I know,” Steve said. “I’m a prude. Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Bucky said.

Bucky took his hand and led the way down the hall to the bedroom. Steve hadn’t changed his mind about sex, but he had made Bucky take pause long enough that he was no longer manhandling him into submission. They finished undressing each other and Steve lay back on the bed as Bucky crawled up the mattress to him.

“We can do this first, but we’re talking about what happened, Buck,” Steve said.

Bucky nodded and kissed him, ran his mouth softly along his jaw to nip at his ear as he urged Steve onto his side and moved up against his back. “We’ll talk about it later,” he said. “I’ve wanted to do this for months.”

“Months? But we just—” Steve broke off with a gasp.

Bucky pressed his mouth to the back of Steve’s neck, teeth lightly pressing, as he ran his hand down his side and over his hip. He ground against him and wrapped his hand around Steve’s cock. It was the left hand and the contrast of chill metal on his warm flesh was shocking.

“Months,” Bucky confirmed. “After the fight’s over. I don’t know how many times I thought about waking you up for it.”

“But you didn’t,” Steve said. He tilted his head back against Bucky’s shoulder so he could get to his throat. “Why didn’t you?”

Bucky smiled into his skin. “I guess I’m just nice like that,” he said. “The _stuff_ is on your side. Get it for me.”

The rough, grabbing, demanding want was gone and Bucky was gentler with him than Steve had expected after that. He took his time and unlike that first time months and months ago, there was no pain at all when he slipped inside. Bucky had learned Steve’s body since then, memorized the things he liked and how he liked them, and familiarized himself with everything from the way he shivered when Bucky breathed softly behind his ear to how he said Bucky’s name around a moan when he wanted more. He withheld pleasure from him sometimes just to hear him moan his name that way; frustrated and breathless. Full bottom lip held between his teeth like he couldn’t bear it, eyes closed as if savoring something sweet, golden eyelashes so damn long Bucky felt them flutter between his lips when he kissed him there.

Steve brought his own hand to his mouth as everything built to a climax and bit down on the back of his knuckles. His stomach muscles tightened against Bucky’s palm and he knew and moved faster. Steve moaned and reached back with his free hand to touch Bucky, felt his fingers slip in the sweat along his side. With his eyes closed, he remembered Bucky’s body slamming into his, the hellicarrier coming to flaming pieces all around them. He remembered steel biting into his back as he felt Bucky’s stomach there now, sweat tickling on his skin between them, the slap of their bodies colliding.

His orgasm blazed through him and he moaned into his fisted hand. Bucky reached up and took Steve’s wrist, pulled his hand away from his mouth as he continued to thrust, fucking him through it. Steve’s mouth fell open and when he moaned again, it went unmuffled into the dark room. Bucky made a sound low in his throat that was part pleased laughter and part possessive growl and it sent a thrill through Steve’s belly as sharp as a knife. When Bucky came, he gasped, drew breath through his nose and gritted his teeth. He shivered when Steve ran his hand down his side and pulled him closer and went still with his head resting between his shoulders.

Sometimes the aftermath was like a car crash, Steve thought as they lay there not speaking, catching their breath. Sometimes he thought that was a perfect analogy for all of it, not only this. Even when Bucky had been trying to kill him, he’d been everything Steve wanted. That wild fear in his eyes had been a reflection of his own—fear that he’d found him again only to lose him. Then Steve had been the one to fall instead of Bucky that time and Bucky had dragged him to safety the way Steve had only imagined and dreamed himself doing hundreds of times.

This whole romance of theirs was like a car crash, but they were survivors.

“Do you still want to talk about it?” Bucky asked.

His voice was rough and Steve cleared his own throat, suddenly very thirsty. “We have to talk about it,” he said.

“Okay,” Bucky said.

Steve waited and when Bucky didn’t say anything else, he sighed. “I guess I’ll start. Why did you lie to me about it?”

“I didn’t lie to you about it. You never asked about it,” Bucky said.

While that was technically true, Bucky had been _sneaking_ out of the apartment to do it, so not saying anything about it wasn’t really how he had lied. He had lied by saying nothing and by leaving when Steve wasn’t awake to see him go.

He decided not to accuse him though. It didn’t seem like the right tactic to take. Bucky wouldn’t hurt him; Steve believed that. Bucky would not shout at him either. What Bucky might do if he didn’t like the way this conversation was going was get up and walk out of the room. Steve wanted to avoid that if he could.

“All right,” he said. “Why do you… What… Why do you _go_ there? Why do you do it? Is it for the money? Because I—”

“Because I need to,” Bucky said. “I need to do _something_.”

“But beat people up?” 

“Yes.”

Steve turned his head to look at him over his shoulder and frowned. “But _why_?”

“I feel better,” Bucky said. “It… helps. It makes everything clear… quieter. It’s what makes sense. I don’t kill people.”

“Well, sure, I didn’t think so,” Steve said. “But… We could spar. Why wouldn’t that be the same thing?”

Bucky thought about it. “It just wouldn’t be. I don’t know how to explain it. Do you want me stop going?”

“Yes,” Steve said immediately. Then he took a minute to consider it and said, “No. I guess not. But… be careful. I don’t think anyone would like it if they knew.”

Bucky’s eyes narrowed at that. They both knew Steve was talking about Nick Fury and his supporters. Steve did not trust Nick Fury very much anymore, but Bucky had never trusted him and he also didn’t like him. He especially disliked being threatened, manipulated and controlled.

“I won’t tell if you won’t,” he said.

“I’m coming with you next time,” Steve said.

Bucky eyed him suspiciously. “Why?”

“To watch, of course. And to… um…”

“Watch me.”

“Not like _that_ ,” Steve said, sitting up. “Not to keep an eye on you or anything like that. Just, well, to watch you.”

He blushed and though Bucky couldn’t see it in the dark, he smiled like he knew anyway. He sat up and leaned back against the headboard beside Steve. “You like to watch, huh?”

Embarrassed, Steve shrugged. “Not like _that_.”

Bucky turned his head and leaned over to speak so his breath would tickle along Steve’s ear. “Yeah you do. And it’s totally like _that_.”

“Fine, I won’t go then,” Steve said. “If you don’t want me to.”

“Who the hell said I don’t want you to?” Bucky said. “Go ahead. Then I won’t have to trudge all the way back home before I can get my hands on you. See? It works out in both of our favor.”

Steve elbowed him. It was automatic, something he might have done when they were kids together and Bucky had teased him unbearably, and it brought with it a flash of memory. Not even a picture, just a feeling. It was both a good feeling and a sad one because sometimes he still found himself missing Bucky when he was sitting right beside him.

“I’m gross. I’m gonna take a shower,” Steve said.

Steve was in the shower with shampoo in his hair and his eyes closed against the soap when Bucky slid the glass door open and stepped in with him. Steve ducked his head under the water to rinse it away and Bucky put his arms around him and his chin on his shoulder.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Steve said.

“Steve.”

“Nothing. I just miss you sometimes.”

Bucky nodded. “Yeah.”

He didn’t try to make Steve feel better by telling him that he was right there. That he wouldn’t leave him. That he shouldn’t be scared or worried. For some reason, that made Steve feel better anyway.

The next morning they got started late on their run. It was hot enough in D.C. that time of year that other people they saw in the park had fans and wore hats with visors, sunglasses and tank tops or just went shirtless. Steve and Bucky both broke a sweat right before they stopped around noon, but they were nowhere near as miserable as other people in the heat.

They walked to a café Steve had eaten lunch at once before with Sam and had sandwiches and iced coffee. Bucky flirted with their waitress a little—a brunette with big brown eyes and a pretty smile—and Steve stared at him because he hadn’t seen Bucky do anything like that in a long time. Not since he’d tried it with Peggy and she’d shut him down, and his heart hadn’t really been in it then. His heart wasn’t in it this time either, but he smiled when she smiled and it was all in fun.

“I think maybe the fights _are_ good for you,” Steve said when the waitress was gone.

Bucky gave him a questioning look and took a bite of his sandwich.

“You just seem… better, I guess,” Steve said. “More relaxed.”

“Maybe I am,” Bucky said.

“I just never thought of pounding people’s faces in as relaxing or, well, therapeutic,” Steve said.

“You should try it,” Bucky said.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“You might like it.”

“All the more reason not to.”

Bucky shook his head a little and went back to his lunch. “Have it your way.”

They took a shortcut through a service alley on their way back to the apartment. Steve didn’t talk much while they walked and Bucky was content without conversation. Steve’s mind was on the hearing, which was four days away. He couldn’t help playing possible scenarios through his head, wondering what they would ask and if they asked it, what he would say. Was he actually prepared to perjure himself if they asked him about Bucky?

The short answer: Yes. Of course.

He wouldn’t let them take him away from him. He wouldn’t let them take Bucky and punish him for the things that people they had recruited and trusted had done to him and made him do. He would not allow it and he definitely had no intention of helping them with it, so yeah, he would lie. He would do it under oath while swearing it was the truth with his hand on a Bible if that was what he had to do to protect him. He owed Bucky that and for what had been done to him, he didn’t owe SHIELD anything else. If there was some plan to resurrect them from the ashes, he wanted nothing to do with it.

Someone stepped into the alley and started toward them, walking at a casual pace. It didn’t occur to Steve that the man was dressed much too warmly for the hot weather until he was nearly upon them.

He pulled a gun from the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt and pointed it at Steve. “You got any fucking money? I bet you do. I bet you got at least a hundred in that pocket there, don’t—”

“Put the gun away and leave,” Bucky said.

The young man in the hoodie shoved his hood down with his other hand, revealing a face ravaged by drugs, and turned the gun on Bucky. “What the fuck did you just say to me? You giving me orders now? Do I got the gun in my hand or do you? Do I look like I fucking take orders from you, motherfucker?”

Bucky’s expression had gone blank and his eyes glacier cold. He watched the young man advance toward him, gun pointed right in his face, with the same fear he might have shown for a blind, spitting newborn kitten.

“Bucky,” Steve said, his tone warning, “don’t.”

“That’s right, fuck-face, listen to the man,” the young man said. “ _Don’t_ you do a fucking thing except exactly what I fucking tell you to do and I’m telling you to empty your damn pockets and _give me your money_!”

It happened fast. So fast that Steve didn’t have a chance to say anything, let alone form any real plan of action. Their would-be-mugger took another aggressive step toward them, gun still pointed in Bucky’s face, finger jittering around the trigger. Then Bucky moved, seized the hand holding the gun, broke his wrist, used it to yank him in toward him, grabbed his head and twisted once sharply. The gun fell to the ground, bones popped and snapped, and the dead man’s body fell to the ground at Bucky’s feet like a bundle of dirty rags.

“Bucky! Oh, God, what did you do?!” Steve said, staring down at the dead man. Bucky had broken his neck with such force that he had almost turned his head completely around on his neck. Steve felt vaguely ill at the sight. “Oh, my god. He’s dead. He’s _so_ dead, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, he is,” Buck said. He saw Steve’s face, how pale he looked and frowned. “You’ve seen dead people before, Steve.”

“He wasn’t a soldier though!” Steve said, a little too loudly. “He’s just a person. A messed up person, but not a soldier.”

“People die in alleys every day. Today, it wasn’t us, it was him,” Bucky said. He looked around for somewhere to dump the body, spotted a dumpster back the way they had come and reached down to pick the dead man up. “I’m gonna dump this. Don’t forget to breathe, Steve.”

“Dump… Bucky, you can’t do that. We have to call somebody,” Steve said.

“No, we don’t. Look at this guy,” Bucky used the dead man’s hair to lift his head for Steve to see.

Steve turned his face away, disgusted. Not by the pits and scabs on the man’s face so much as by the casual way Bucky handled his corpse.

Bucky let go of his hair. “Nobody’s going to miss this guy.”

He picked up the gun off the ground on his way down the alley and stuffed the body in the dumpster under several trash bags filled with garbage and cans. The gun he put under the waist of his pants at the small of his back and pulled the hem of his shirt down to hide it.

When he returned to Steve’s side, Steve was staring down at a small puddle of blood that had leaked from the dead man’s mouth onto the asphalt. He had a few droplets on his face from when it had sprayed from his mouth as Bucky twisted his head around. Bucky reached over, took his face in his hands and wiped the blood away with his thumb and finger.

“Why did you have to _kill_ him?” Steve asked.

Bucky shrugged. “I assessed the situation and determined him to be a threat. A minor one with a very high probability of escalation.”

“Yeah, but you could have knocked him out, Bucky,” Steve said. “You didn’t have to kill him.”

“No, but if you knock a guy out, he gets back up and tries to kill you again. If you kill a guy, he doesn’t,” Bucky said.

“Bucky…”

“We need to go before we draw attention.”

Steve looked back once at the big green dumpster where Bucky had dumped the dead man. He didn’t like it, but there wasn’t anything to be done about it now. The man did have a gun and threaten them with it. Bucky had overreacted a little, but Bucky would not look at a person like that holding a gun on him or Steve and wonder about his life, about other people who might love him, about his potential. He looked at a person holding a gun on him as a threat to be eliminated and was it any surprise that hadn’t changed? Months of quiet life with Steve versus years of conditioning, programming, psychological torture and experience dealing with hostile enemies; the quiet life didn’t stand a chance, no matter how nice it might be. Bucky had a limited number of ways to deal with threats to himself and none of those included letting the threat walk away after a stern lecture to reconsider its life choices.

And maybe Steve was rationalizing it a little too much. Maybe he was a little too ready to accept what had happened because what else could he do?

That night they watched a couple movies on Netflix then Steve checked the news online while Bucky sat by the window and watched the people and cars go by outside. There was nothing to be found online about a body found in a dumpster a few blocks from the apartment, but Steve didn’t let himself completely relax. There were many reasons why it might not be in the news yet. Maybe they hadn’t found the body. Maybe no one knew the man was missing yet. Maybe the garbage hadn’t been picked up. Maybe they hadn’t made a statement about it yet because they still had to contact the man’s family. There were a lot of reasons.

Steve told himself that the most logical reason was that no one had found the body. It was entirely possible that no one would find the body, he reasoned. What were the odds of that?

Bucky sat down beside him on the sofa and Steve closed the laptop with a sigh and looked at him. “What are we going to do if someone finds out?” he asked.

Bucky didn’t answer him. He put his head on Steve’s shoulder and Steve sighed, put a hand up to run his fingers through his hair and told himself that everything was fine. No one would find out. Even if they found the body, how would they connect it to Bucky when he wasn’t even supposed to be alive? They were safe.

He didn’t feel completely safe though. Usually with Bucky there he never felt safer, but he couldn’t fight this; he couldn’t punch it in the face.

Bucky stretched out on the sofa and laid his head in Steve’s lap. On his back, looking up at him, his hair fanned out on Steve’s legs, he didn’t look all that dangerous. It made Steve smile and he lowered his hand to continue stroking his hair, which Bucky seemed to like.

“You remember that time in seventh grade when my mom took us to the beach and you almost drowned?” Bucky asked.

Steve jumped a little, surprised not so much by the memory as he was that it was _Bucky’s_ memory. “I almost drowned every time I got in the water, you have to be more specific,” he said.

“You wanted to learn how to dive. I think you hit your head on the dock,” Bucky said. “You kept trying though.”

“I remember,” Steve said. It had been in July. Sometime after the fourth because he remembered their families had spent the forth together. Bucky’s dad had barbequed and one of Bucky’s little sisters had kissed Steve on the cheek. “I still don’t like water.”

Bucky smiled. “Why not? Now you can jump out of planes without a parachute into the ocean and you’re fine.”

Steve nodded. “That’s true. I feel like maybe I’ve beat water at its own game. Now we have a truce.”

Bucky laughed. “That’s one way to look at it.”

There was a sharp, loud knock on the door and Bucky’s demeanor instantly changed. He went from relaxed and smiling to tense, got off the sofa without a word and was halfway to the door before Steve thought to go after him.

“Jesus, Buck, am I ever going to get to answer my own door again?” he asked.

“No,” Bucky said. He opened to door and they both looked out at Natasha Romanov standing on the doorstep.

She looked between them, her eyes landing on Bucky, and raised one finely arched eyebrow. “Boys?”

“What do you want?” Bucky asked. He didn’t snap it, he didn’t shout, he was calm, but Natasha still frowned at him and shifted uneasily.

Instead of answering him, she looked past him at Steve, “Pack your bags, Cap. We’ve got a mission.”

Steve groaned. “This day just gets better and better,” he muttered. “Fine, I’ll be just a minute.”

He went to get his things and left Bucky and Natasha in the doorway staring at each other. It only took him a couple of minutes to get changed and pack a bag. He already kept one packed and ready for when he needed it and only had to throw in a few things before zipping it and heading out.

“Look, Barnes, are you going to let me inside or what? I thought you old guys were supposed to be chivalrous,” Natasha said.

Steve heard her as he crossed the living room to the kitchen for a bottle of water. He stuffed it and a couple of Power Bars into his bag. “Bucky, let her in. It’s okay,” he called.

He heard Bucky make a sound a lot like a growl and then Natasha shouted at him to “Come get your damn guard dog, Steve.”

It irritated him to hear her call him that, and so casually, but he didn’t say anything about it. Natasha had mostly gotten over her fear of Bruce Banner’s big, bad green alter ego after they defeated the aliens in New York together, but Bucky was an outlier. She was afraid of him. Steve knew it. Hell, _Bucky_ knew it. Steve didn’t foresee them ever making friends either because Bucky didn’t trust Natasha and never had. Bucky had nearly killed her more than once and would not hesitate to try again, so Natasha didn’t trust him either. The difference was, Bucky wouldn’t pretend to be Natasha’s friend before he killed her.

Steve hefted his bag onto his shoulder and went to the door. He put a hand on Bucky’s arm when he was behind him and Bucky glanced back then stepped aside for him to pass.

“Where are we going?” Steve asked her. “I have that hearing and I shouldn’t miss it.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Natasha said. She relaxed slightly and took a step back as Steve left the apartment and joined her. Her actions were all overly casual, a mask against either anger or fear—or both. She checked something on her watch then shrugged. “They’ll tell us the specifics when we’re on the plane. All I know is we might be gone a while. Several days at least.”

Steve didn’t need to look at Bucky to know that he was not pleased by this news. He turned to him and Bucky was still eying Natasha like he was considering various methods of torture. After a few seconds, he shifted his gaze to Steve. “I should come with you,” he said. 

“Absolutely not,” Natasha said. 

Bucky ignored her. “I don’t like it.”

“I’ll be fine,” Steve said. “Remember, I’m a big boy now.”

Bucky’s lips twitched in a faint smile. “Yeah. All right. I still don’t like it.”

“Say goodbye, boys. We’ve got to get moving,” Natasha said. 

A muscle along Bucky’s jaw jumped as he gritted his teeth. Then he hooked an arm around Steve, pulled him in and kissed him. It wasn’t a quick, soft goodbye kiss. It was more a passionate, defiant kiss. An angry kiss. Steve started to pull back, his first thought about it being inappropriate and much too public in the hallway outside the front door, but then he decided the hell with it. It was already happening and it couldn’t be undone and he might not see Bucky for a week, so why not make it good? He kissed him back and Bucky smiled against his mouth when he responded.

Bucky let him go and Steve was breathing hard. 

“Wow,” Natasha said dryly. 

“Fuck off,” Bucky said. 

“Hey now,” Steve said, looking between them. “Okay, let’s go. Jeez, you guys. We’re on the same side, you know.”

Bucky snorted dismissively. “Don’t get killed,” he told Steve.

He had no similar admonishments for Natasha. He glanced between them one last time with displeasure, then went back into the apartment and closed the door. 

Steve turned to Natasha. “I really wish you two could…”

“Be friends?” Natasha asked, walking beside him. “Not gonna happen.”

Steve walked by the elevators as Natasha stopped and hit the button to take them down. “We’re taking the stairs,” he said.


	5. Chapter 5

What do you mean?  
Evil has never loved you

_\--Union of Knives_

 

Without Steve there to keep him company and keep him occupied, Bucky got bored pretty quickly. He was capable of sitting still and quiet doing nothing for long periods of time if that was what he had to do, but if he didn’t have to do it, he would rather not. He kept the same schedule he’d fallen into with Steve in the mornings and ran regularly every day. He went to a fight the night after Steve left and that helped like it always did, but it didn’t last and he couldn’t do it every night. In the evenings he would sometimes go downstairs to the gym and hit the bags, but he got tired of that, too. Without Steve there, he was at a loss about what to do with himself.

Bucky Barnes, that young, intrepid soldier, had not been so single-minded. He’d had interests outside of combat. He’d had family and friends and lovers. He had been a social creature. There had been women and dancing. In school, there had been sports and friends. He had been popular. He had been smart, attractive, witty, usually kind. He had read books. Jules Verne was his favorite. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea with Captain Nemo; that had been his favorite book.

There were also a lot of things about young Bucky Barnes that people believed but were not true. The man everyone back home thought they knew, the man they believed him to be, could not have been a sniper. He could not have made such decisions and so coldly taken so many lives and carried on being the happy smiling guy they all loved. He had always had a cold streak. There had always been something inside him that knew how to damage and hurt without a fuss.

Only Steve had ever caught sight of it then. Only glimpses behind the curtain though.

But that hadn’t been everything. There was more. At one time, there had been _more_.

Bucky turned his attention to Steve’s bookshelves and tried to find interest in them again like he would have done if he were still that boy. It had been a long time since he had read a book just for the hell of it. A book that was not meant to be information the Winter Soldier absorbed, that was used to manipulate his thoughts and emotions, to form a core of conviction inside him that would make him a tool and a weapon.

He took a book from the shelf. It was a hardcover book, large, and on the cover was an artist’s rendering of Captain America and Steve had never looked more like a superhero—or a cartoon character. It was a history book, a biography about Steve, about the people around him during the war and what they had done. About Peggy and a little bit about the SSR and later, SHIELD. Not SHIELD as it had become, not the corrupt organization with HYDRA rotting it from the inside, but SHIELD as it had been intended to be.

Bucky flipped through the pages, read some of it, scoffed over what he knew was false or exaggerated, over the hypotheses, over the ridiculous artwork that had begun before Steve went into the ice and continued after his “death” for many years. There were a few photographs of them from the war. Bucky stared for a long time at a sepia photograph of himself with Steve, Steve laughing and Bucky smiling at him, standing beside an old truck. In the background he noticed other men that he vaguely recognized but could no longer name until he read their names beneath the picture. The Howling Commandos. He remembered them. Remembered that they had all laughed at the name when they first heard it, but it had been the one that stuck with them.

He had liked those men. He’d been profoundly changed by the time he met them, not the same person, the same man who smiled too easily, laughed even when he didn’t really mean it, or walked into a room without his eyes scanning the shadows. Still, he had liked them, trusted them. They had probably been some of the only true friends he’d had other than Steve.

It felt surreal to be holding a book written years after their greatest battles, after some of them had died of old age, while standing there in Steve’s apartment. This was history now, but Bucky’s own face was hardly a minute older than the young smiling one on the page. Steve looked the same. All the rest of them were ashes.

He put the book back on the shelf and walked away from it. Steve had left his sketch book out on the coffee table and out of curiosity Bucky picked it up and opened it to the first page. There was a drawing of Sam with his robotic wings, soaring with a corkscrew jet stream of motion behind him. The next pages were sketches of people Bucky didn’t know. Quick figure studies from the look of it. The next was a picture of Bucky and he stared at it. Not a quick study this time, a detailed drawing, but done from memory. He was dressed in the uniform he’d worn the day he shipped out to England, the cap on his head casting a little shadow over his face, a smile, almost a smirk curling his mouth up in a pleased, arrogant way.

Bucky ran his fingertip lightly over the graphite. He remembered that day. How he’d found Steve in another alley taking another beating and run the other man off. The look on Steve’s face when he saw the uniform and realized what it meant.

Bucky walked by the table over to the chairs by the windows at the far side of the room. When he was alone in the apartment he didn’t turn on a lot of lights. He preferred the dark. A single lamp was on near the sofa, but the street lights would illuminate the pages of the sketch book for him so he went to stand there and turned a page.

Peggy carter in her flashy red dress looked back at him from the book. Her lips were dark red, too. Steve had colored it with a colored pencil and the red popped because it was the only color. Bucky remembered her then, striding into the bar in that dress, her hips swaying, her head high. None of them had seen a woman like her in a very long time, but even if war-torn Germany and Austria had been populated by women in flashy cocktail dresses, Peggy would have turned heads that evening.

Steve had tried to act like he knew what to do with her, but he hadn’t been fooling anyone. Bucky thought Peggy had liked that about him. They were very much alike when it came to Steve. Peggy still laughed about it when Bucky had told her how Steve blushed and they had shared a knowing look; the woman who’d had him then and the man who had him now.

This was all history, but it wasn’t in any book on any shelves or in any libraries. They were never going to make TV specials about that part of their lives. That was the real stuff. The blood and guts of it. The bones. Those were the things they had really fought for when they had battled the red skull. Peggy Carter in her red dress, the people who knew that Steve Rogers blushed like a girl when the guys started telling stories, Erskine’s schnapps, Dum Dum Dugan’s stinky cigars, Howard Stark’s mad brilliance and bizarre taste for cheese fondue. No one wrote about it, but those were the memories that socked you in the gut. Bucky didn’t remember Steve as the comic book hero or Peggy as the silly woman from the 40s radio show who was perpetually being rescued by him. Those were fictions.

He touched the page with Peggy’s picture on it and felt the smooth paper without smudging it. She would never look like that again, but she had once. Even now, it was how Steve remembered her. It was how Steve remembered Bucky; proud and foolish, adorned for battle, the light in his eyes still there and bright with all the things he didn’t know yet about war.

The window in front of him suddenly shattered inward and a projectile flew past Bucky, so close to his face that he felt the breath of its passage on his cheek. He dropped the sketch book on the chair and turned to find an arrow embedded in the wall behind him. It took him only a second to understand the danger he was in and then he was moving.

He yanked the arrow from the wall and headed toward the bedroom. There was a note wrapped around the staff of the arrow near the pointed head and he removed it and paused inside the bedroom to unroll it and read.

_**THEY’RE COMING. GET OUT NOW.** _

Bucky crushed the paper and stuffed it in his pocket, kept the arrow for its potential as a weapon and opened the closet. Inside on the floor hidden beneath a floorboard under the carpet, he had two handguns and ammunition for them. They were loaded and he took them both.

Out in the apartment, there was a clatter followed by a flash and a smell Bucky recognized as nerve gas that would render most people paralyzed on contact. He had never had one used on him, but he had made use of similar grenades in the past on missions.

He stepped out into the hall, right into the gas and a dark figure in combat gear wearing a gas mask cut through the fog and came at him. Bucky used the arrow, slammed the man against the wall with one hand and drove the arrow through his throat with the other.

There was gunfire on his left and Bucky felt the impact of a bullet in his side. It didn’t slow him. He snarled and raised his own gun, shot the man in the neck, the unprotected gap between his body armor and mask. He fell back and another one entered the hallway, taking his place. Bucky shot him, too, and walked toward them. He moved quickly, guarding his injured side by turning his body to the side, making a narrower target of himself and keeping his back to the wall.

There were more men in the living room coming toward him. He counted five and fired as he moved rapidly toward the busted window. He couldn’t get out the door, they were in front of it and there were undoubtedly more men beyond the apartment to keep the peace and ready to enter if they were needed. That way was blocked.

He shot another man in combat gear and took his rifle from him, moved toward the window hunched slightly down. There were two men coming up the fire escape outside. Bucky shot them both with the rifle and climbed up onto the windowsill.

“Barnes, what the hell do you think you’re doing, man?”

Bucky turned his head to look toward the sound of that voice and Clint Barton came toward him through the fog of gas that was beginning to clear. He had a mask protecting him from the gas. Bucky knew the man’s voice and recognized him by the way he moved; calmly, fearlessly, hands always at the ready. There was a bow and quiver at his back.

Bucky stepped back inside the apartment and lifted the rifle to his shoulder, aimed it between Clint Barton’s eyes. Clint raised his hands, a placating gesture that made Bucky only more suspicious of his intentions.

“Hey, I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.

Bucky’s eyes narrowed. “No, you’re not,” he said.

“I warned you, didn’t I? Come on, put the gun down,” Clint said. “That’s it for now; they’re all gone, but they’ll send more when they realize the whole team got taken out. We have to get the fuck out of here.”

“Oh, do _we_ now?” Bucky said.

Clint sighed. “Yeah, _we_ do,” he said. He nodded back toward the door. “Come on.”

Bucky stared at him for a beat longer. Then he tossed the rifle down in favor of his own handguns and walked by Clint, leaving him to hurry to catch up with him. If there was more shooting, it would be in close quarters and the handguns were better. He considered the elevators or the stairs as he reached them and decided on the stairs. There might be men, but at least in the stairwell he could move more freely. The elevator could be overridden.

Clint was of the same mind and didn’t even pause at the elevators. Bucky watched him out the corner of his eye as he drew his bow and notched an arrow.

“That weapon is impractical here,” Bucky said. He offered Clint one of his guns.

Clint shook his head, a faint smile on his lips. “I appreciate it, but I can’t shoot a gun for shit,” he said. “You keep it.”

Bucky opened the door and entered the stairwell, guns before him, Clint at his back. They heard rapid footsteps coming up the stairs when they were only two floors down. A gun blast, the bullet pinged off the railing by Bucky. Clint fired an arrow down the stairwell and someone screamed, a man fell. Shouting and cursing as they drew closer. The crackle of barked orders filtered through coms.

Bucky paused to look over the railing and fired three times. Two men went down. Clint shot another one. It was like they were multiplying as they ascended the stairs. If there were more going up in the elevators, they would reach the floor where the apartment was soon and find their dead comrades.

“We’re going to be trapped in here if we don’t do something,” Bucky called back to Clint. “Cover me.”

“What? Wait, don’t—Ah, shit.”

Bucky leapt down the last four stairs to the landing, fired over the side, then climbed it and jumped down to the next landing right into a group of armed men. The move was so unexpected and sudden that they floundered, grabbing for their weapons. Bucky, broke one neck, slammed a man’s head against the railing so hard that his skull cracked and threw two over the railing into the stairwell to fall screaming to the bottom. More hurried up the stairs to meet him, their guns firing, so loud in the confined chamber of the stairwell that it was deafening.

Another bullet hit Bucky in the back and he cried out, pain shooting through him, the impact throwing him against the wall. Clint took out three men with arrows as they hurried to close in on him while he was injured. Bucky recovered himself quickly though, pushed the pain down and out of his mind. He had been trained to not feel such things in the heat of battle. Repairs would be made after.

He screamed in wordless fury as he turned back toward the fight, seized a man dressed all in black gear and threw him against the wall, another that came right behind him he punched in the face with his left arm, felt his bones shatter in the pressure of the impact. He picked up a fallen man’s gun, fired as he descended the stairs and killed a man who was about to put a bullet in the back of Clint’s head. They made slow, steady progress that way. Overhead, a door opened and slammed, feet pounded on the stairs as more men descended into the stairwell after them.

An alarm started to blare and a red light over their heads began to flash. Someone had yanked the fire alarm.

Then they were at the bottom and their way was clear, Bucky hit the door, slamming it open, and staggered out. Clint was right behind him and he grabbed the back of Bucky’s shirt and tugged, directing him to go right. They ran.

There was a car parked in the alley around the back of the apartment building. There were two vans also parked at the end of the alley, but they sat empty with their doors open. Clint got in the car and started it and Bucky collapsed into the passenger seat.

“Christ, you’ve been shot,” Clint said, even as he hit the gas and the car roared down the alley and turned onto the street. “Don’t you dare die on me, Barnes. Steve would kill me.”

“I’m not going to die,” Bucky said. He twisted around in his seat to look out the back window. There was no one in pursuit—yet. “This is not what kills me.”

“Here’s hoping,” Clint said. He ran a red light. “Question is, now what do I do with you?”

“Stark,” Bucky said. He groaned as he sat back and sank into his seat. The bullet in his side had passed clean through, but the one in his back was lodged against his shoulder blade. “Take me to Stark. But first, I have to get the bullet out of my back.”

“ _First_? Are you shitting me?” Clint said. He darted a glance at Bucky. “What am I supposed to do, take you to a hospital? That’s a bad idea.”

“No,” Bucky said. “Go to the drug store. Get some tweezers, gauze, bandages, a sewing kit if they’ve got one.”

“No way, I’m not sewing you up with a sewing kit in a truck stop bathroom on—”

“It will turn septic in a matter of hours if it doesn’t come out,” Bucky snapped. “You want to help me? That’s what I need right now.”

“All right, fine. But you know, before we go prospecting for lead in your back, I need to feel like I’ve shaken these fucking guys and we’re safe,” Clint said. “So it’s gonna have to wait.”

Bucky didn’t argue with him about it anymore and sat there with his eyes closed, trying to concentrate on something else. When it occurred to him, he asked, “Is Steve safe?”

“Far as I know, he’s fine,” Clint said. “He’s sure going to be pissed about this though.”

“Yes, he takes betrayal… badly,” Bucky said. “Really, it was only to be expected.”

Clint glanced at him. “You’re telling me you’ve been expecting this?”

“Something like it,” Bucky said. “Why now?”

“You killed a guy the other day,” Clint said. “Put him in a dumpster?”

“I remember,” Bucky said.

“Between you and me, I’m thinking it was just a good excuse to finally do it,” Clint said. “Fury’s got no love for you. Doesn’t trust you.”

“Untrustworthy people do not easily trust other people in my experience,” Bucky said. “I have never trusted Nick Fury.”

“Yeah, well you did try to kill him,” Clint said.

Bucky smiled and closed his eyes again. “Yes. My mistake was that I _didn’t_ ,” he said. “Why are you helping me?”

“I don’t know. A few reasons, I guess,” Clint said. “Guy you killed was a junkie with a violent criminal record a mile long. I’m thinking he might have deserved it. Then there’s the question of blame when it comes to some of the shit you’ve done. I figure if Tony Stark can find a way to be okay with the fact you killed his mom and dad, then it’s probably not as black and white as all that. HYDRA took over SHIELD from the inside, turned it bad right under all our noses, and Fury thinks SHIELD’s worth saving anyway. I know who you are and who you were and I think who you were means you should get the benefit of the doubt about who you are, if that makes sense. Then there’s Steve. I owe him a hell of a lot and even if I didn’t, he’s a good guy. One of the best. He deserves better than this.”

Bucky sat there and thought about it for a minute. He believed him. Clint didn’t have any reason to lie. It would only put him in danger from here on out to turn against Fury and whatever passed for SHIELD these days to help him. “Thank you,” he said.

“Sure, no problem,” Clint said. “I think it’s safe to find that drug store now.”

Clint went into the Walgreens and Bucky waited in the car while he bought the supplies. He returned with large bandages and gauze, tweezers, Q-tips, rubbing alcohol, Neosporin and a tiny sewing kit. They pulled around back of the store and he took the bullet out of Bucky’s back and patched him up the best he could in a hurry. Then Bucky climbed in the back of the car and fell asleep while Clint drove them north toward New York City.

Bucky wasn’t doing so well by the time they got to Stark Tower and Clint had to put an arm around him and help him walk. He had bled through the bandages and the blood soaked through the back of Bucky’s shirt into Clint’s arm, but Bucky’s sweatshirt and jeans were black, which disguised the blood somewhat. They made it past the front door security to the lobby before anyone noticed anything was wrong.

As they reached the reception desk, a woman noticed the blood on the floor dripping in a trail in Bucky’s wake and shouted for security.

“Shit,” Clint muttered. He left Bucky standing and went over to the desk. The girl there stood up and reached for the phone. “Hold on, look, we’re friends of Stark’s. Get Pepper Potts on the phone and tell her we’re here, please.”

“I’m going to have to check with Miss Hill first—”

“No,” Clint said, reaching over the desk to push down the button on the phone and hang it up before she had even started to dial. “Don’t do that. Call—”

“Oh, my god, Bucky, what happened?”

Clint turned his back on the receptionist to watch Pepper, clutching a file to her chest, dressed in white and silver Armani, rush as fast as she could on four inch heels to Bucky’s side. Bucky felt relief wash over him at the sight of her. She didn’t touch him, but not like she was afraid to or afraid of _him_ , more like she worried she might hurt him. Her hands made little hesitant fluttering motions over him that at any other time he probably would have found amusing.

“Someone help me!” Pepper shouted. “Oh, my god, you’re bleeding.”

“I need to sit down,” Bucky said. His head was swimming and he braced himself against one of the chairs near him and closed his eyes. “I think… I’m done…”

“Oh, no. Someone—Clint!”

Clint grabbed Bucky around the waist and hefted him up and Bucky watched through the slits of his eyes as another man came to help him. Bucky recognized him, though he couldn’t remember his name. It was a strange one. 

“Have them ready the infirmary and get a doctor,” Pepper was instructing someone. “Happy, what are you doing?”

“This is a huge security breach and I—”

“No, stop talking. Help Clint. Bucky, you’re okay. We’re going to fix it,” Pepper said. 

He was vaguely aware of her on his right, of other people around him hurrying to do what she told them to. He couldn’t focus on any one person though and his head swam, felt heavier than it was, his vision swimming in and out to black. 

“You have to call Steve,” he muttered. 

“What?” Pepper asked. 

“Barton,” Bucky said. “You have to tell him. He needs to know. He…”

Bucky went completely under then and the blackness that slipped into his vision and took it over did not recede. He felt himself crumple and there was nothing he could do about it. Then he was gone.


	6. Chapter 6

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.

_\--William Blake_

 

The HYDRA base turned out to be empty when they got there. Stark had also come along, with a handful of other agents who were with Natasha and they all seemed anxious and so ready for anything that they might accidentally shoot each other if something _did_ happen. The base was a facility in the Austrian Alps and when Natasha had told Steve that, he’d felt like she’d socked him in the stomach.

He couldn’t remember those mountains without remembering the train and Bucky falling away from him down through the snow. A scream mostly blown away by the frigid wind and Bucky plummeting backward, smaller and smaller until he was gone from sight.

The base had been cleaned out before they even left the United States and that was evident. There had been a struggle; there was blood and spent rifle casings. There were no bodies though. Someone had cleaned up after themselves and done a pretty poor job of it.

“There’s nothing here,” Steve said, staring at it all, the empty rooms and halls. “Took the dead with them, too, it looks like.”

“I am still trying to figure out why I’m even here,” Stark said as he walked up to stand with Steve. “Do they really need both of us for this?”

“I don’t know. I think it was supposed to be… something else,” Steve said.

“More, you mean. There were supposed to be people here. HYDRA operatives,” Stark said.

“What happened to the bodies?” Steve asked, pointing to some blood on the floor.

“That’s a good question. No, that is an _excellent_ question,” Stark said. He turned around looking for Natasha. “Hey, Romanov, where the fuck are the bodies? Did the survivors come back for them?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Natasha said. She walked past them both down an empty corridor. “They’re dead; it saves us the trouble of having to kill them.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Stark said. “Another way to look at it is this is a trap. Ambush or something. Or maybe you SHIELD guys have bad information. You are all kind of scattered to the winds and banged up, after all. No one would hold it against you if you haven’t really been on your game. So what is it?”

“I don’t know,” Natasha said, doing her best to ignore him. “I told you what I know. This was supposed to be an active site.”

“What are we supposed to do now?” Steve asked her.

“I’ll take the other men and do a sweep then we’ll check the place for tech and files. Anything that could be useful,” Natasha said. “Then I guess we turn back and go home. You’ve got to be in court in a couple days, Steve.”

Steve and Tony Stark watched her and the others walk away. They had their mission.

Steve and Stark exchanged a look. Both of them had been uneasy about this mission since the start. It just didn’t make much sense to either of them. It hadn’t sounded like the sort of mission that required both Steve and Stark to accompany Natasha and the others. If it was a big place crawling with operatives and enemy combatants, they were undermanned, but if it was already abandoned—if they _knew_ it was abandoned—both of them were not needed. Besides that, of all of them, Stark was one of the least likely Avengers to select for such a mission. Clint Barton or even Sam would have made a lot more sense. They could be subtle, they could sneak, they could go undetected; Tony Stark, Iron Man, was not a sneaking thief, he was a flying hammer that came with his own theme music. Usually AC/DC at an obnoxious volume.

The location didn’t make sense either. HYDRA had been birthed during World War II, but it hadn’t dwelled in caves under mountains in a very long time. The last HYDRA facility Steve had assisted with had been disguised as a biotech company under contract with the U.S. government, hiding in plain sight right beneath everyone’s noses. That was how HYDRA survived and prospered. They went for the long con; they infected from the inside. They played dead for seventy years waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike. They didn’t sequester themselves beneath mountaintops in Austria.

“Hello? Pepper, what—Wait, what the hell’s going on?” Stark said.

Steve glanced at him, but he was just standing there in his metal suit. “What is it?”

“It’s Pepper, she’s… distraught,” Stark said. “Give me a minute.” He turned and walked a little away from Steve.

When he returned a little while later, his face mask was off and he appeared to be both angry and a little distraught himself.

“Everything okay?” Steve asked.

“No, we have to go, Rogers,” Stark said. He put a hand on Steve’s shoulder then headed toward the path down the hill where he’d landed the plane. “Right now.”

“Okay, just let me get Natasha and—”

“No, leave them. Come on,” Stark said.

Steve didn’t move to follow him. “I can’t just leave them here like this without even saying anything,” he said. “This is a HYDRA base and okay, it looks abandoned, but what if—”

“It’s not,” Stark said. “Your man’s at my place right now with two bullet holes in him. Barton got him out, but he was sent there to kill him. This whole mission is bullshit and I’d bet you my favorite flying car Romanov’s in on it. Why else would we be out here?”

Steve stared at him in uncomprehending silence for a second. Then he turned his head to look back toward the base where Natasha had disappeared. “What?” he said.

“You heard me,” Stark said. “Fuck her. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“But…” Steve stood another few seconds as it sank in and as it did, he was hit by first the betrayal of it, then fear for Bucky, followed by a wave of overwhelming rage. It happened quickly and Stark stood patiently by and watched it. Then he nodded and they both headed for the plane.

Stark got out of his suit when they were aboard and they took off a few minutes later. Below on the ground, they watched Natasha and the other agents running through the snow for the plane, shielding their eyes from the sun to look up. Then they were too high in the sky to see any of it and the agents below were specks that quickly disappeared.

“Tell me what happened,” Steve said, taking the co-pilot seat next to Stark. “Bucky, is he going to be okay?”

“He’ll live,” Stark said. “JARVIS will see to it and I’ve got a pretty good doctor on retainer.”

“He was _shot_ though?” Steve asked. “On purpose? You’re sure?”

“Barton’s sure,” Tony said. “I guess Barnes killed some guy the other day.”

“It was a crazy drug addict who tried to rob us and pointed a gun at us,” Steve said. “ _I_ wasn’t going to kill him. I mean, I could have talked to him maybe or—But Bucky isn’t like that. He was protecting himself. He was just protecting _me_. It wasn’t—”

Stark shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. They found out about it and sent Barton and a couple teams to take him out.”

“But that’s… that’s not… But _why_?” Steve stuttered.

“Best guess? Because he can’t be controlled. Because he kills first and doesn’t even care about asking questions later,” Stark said. “Don’t get me wrong, I totally respect that kind of commitment. I have a hard time committing to a laundry detergent. But he’s not like you, Cap. You can’t reason with that guy.”

“It’s Fury, isn’t it?” Steve asked. “I thought he was going to disappear. That’s what he said.”

“Well, and he did, didn’t he? Think about it, the man’s dead. There’s a gravestone and everything,” Stark said. “Which is scary to think about.”

“Because everyone thinks he’s dead,” Steve said. “So he can do this. He can kill Bucky and no one would believe it.”

“If they even cared, Rogers,” Stark said. He dragged a hand through his hair, sweaty and tangled from being inside the Iron Man suit, and sighed. “I knew it was a bad idea to hire that Hill woman.”

As soon as the thought occurred to him, he told the computer to call Pepper. When Pepper answered, he told her to have security find Miss Hill and have her removed from the building and her security clearance revoked.

“She wouldn’t try to… would she?” Pepper asked fretfully. On the screen before them, Steve watched her lift her hands close to her chest, clutching a little white puffy kitten. “She’s such a nice woman, Tony.”

“She’s supposed to be a nice woman, baby. So you’ll like her,” Tony said. “It’s not worth the risk. If I’m wrong about her, I can apologize later.”

“I really liked her,” Pepper said. She sighed, turned her head and called, “Happy, I need you to—”

“I’m on it,” Happy said from somewhere off screen.

Pepper smiled. “Thank you. Is Bucky awake yet?”

“He is presently still unconscious, madam,” JARVIS said. “His vitals are stable and I predict a 96.7% chance of full recovery.”

“Good. Thank you, JARVIS,” Pepper said. She turned back to them and smiled at Steve, though the smile wavered a little. “I’m so sorry about all of this, Steve. It’s horrible.”

Steve nodded. “Thank you for… Thank you.”

“Of course. We’re taking good care of him,” Pepper said.

“We’ll be home in about ten hours,” Stark said. “Give or take.”

“Be careful, Tony,” Pepper said.

The call disconnected and Stark and Steve sat in silence for a few minutes. Finally Steve got up and said, “I’m going to go try to catch some sleep. Wake me up if anything… well, if anything happens.”

“He’s going to be fine,” Stark said.

“Yeah,” Steve said. And he knew it was probably true. Bucky was a lot of things, but easy to kill wasn’t among them. Knowing that didn’t keep him from worrying though or make him any less angry that it had happened.

The flight back to New York took almost eleven hours and toward the end Stark was drinking high caffeine energy drinks and chasing them with coffee, which Steve made in the machine in the back of the plane and brought to him; black with a whole lot of sugar. Steve had managed to finally fall asleep and had gotten a couple of hours of rest, but he was too worried and wound up about what was happening to relax and sleep too much.

The plane landed on the roof of Stark Tower and they went directly into the residence. Bucky was in the infirmary; Pepper and Clint Barton were with him.

When they walked through the door, Steve paused and stared, then slowly approached the bed where Bucky was lying. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and the sheets were down around his waist, revealing the bandages wrapped around his stomach and the spots of blood that were screaming, grotesquely red against the white of the gauze. He looked pale, but peaceful in his sleep. He was still and hurt and it diminished him and it didn’t make him look small, but mortal in a way he hadn’t seemed to be since Steve discovered he hadn’t died after all in 1945. There was an IV in his arm and a hologram screen behind him was keeping track of his vitals. Steve watched the bright little orange line of the heart monitor jump in jagged little mountain peaks to the steady beat of Bucky’s heart and he felt sick.

Clint had been dozing at the far end of the room in a chair and he stirred awake when Stark and Steve walked into the room. “Hey, guys.”

“Hey,” Steve said vaguely, staring at Bucky. He was possessed of the sudden, terrifying thought that if he looked away, that little orange jagged line would go flat. “God, he looks so bad.”

“Nah, he’s all right,” Clint said. “The doctor gave him some dope though. He wanted to get up and go after their asses—mostly Nick Fury’s, which I can’t even say I’d blame him for at this point—so he gave him something.”

“He’s sedated,” Pepper said. The fluffy kitten was curled up and purring on Bucky’s chest and she reached over to pet its tiny head. “I thought he might hurt himself.”

“Not likely,” Stark said. “Did you do what I told you to about Hill?”

“Yes, Tony. She didn’t like it, but she’s gone now,” Pepper said. “I feel so awful about all this. Why would Mr. Fury want to kill Bucky?”

“It’s complicated,” Clint said. “Mostly I think he just doesn’t like the idea of him being alive. He did shoot him what, like three times?”

“I think so,” Steve said. He pulled a chair over to the bed beside Bucky and sat down, hunched over with his elbows on the bed beside him. “He’s going to do it again.”

“Do what again?” Pepper asked. “ _This_? You think he’ll do this again?”

“Yeah. When he finds out, he’ll send someone else,” Steve said.

“That would be a really bad idea,” Stark said. “I do not take kindly to housebreakers, especially the kind intent on murdering my houseguests. That shit’s just rude. JARVIS?”

“Yes, sir?” JARVIS said.

“Stop the elevator from going up beyond the two hundredth floor until further notice,” Stark said. “Lock all doors from there on up, I don’t want anyone coming up here without my permission until we figure this out.”

“Yes, sir,” JARVIS said.

Stark rubbed tiredly at his face and sighed. “All right. I am going to go take a shower and get some sleep. In the morning, or whenever I get up, we’ll figure out what to do about this mess. Until then, relax, Captain. Go take a bubble bath. Order room service. Listen to some Enya.”

“Thanks, Stark,” Steve said, not acknowledging the rest of what he’d said. Tony Stark liked to talk, he liked to hear himself talk, sometimes just to fill the silence, to deflect, but sometimes he just couldn’t help himself. Right now he was running on Red Bull, black coffee and bullshit at about twenty-four hours or more without sleep, so it was to be expected. 

Stark nodded and waved one hand dismissively like he was sweeping Steve’s gratitude aside as he walked out of the room. As he was leaving, Pepper stood, scooped up the sleeping kitten and followed him out.

Clint slumped back down in his chair and closed his eyes again. “We’re all going to be wanted men now,” he said. He didn’t sound all that bothered by the notion.

Steve frowned down at Bucky and didn’t say anything. He didn’t care about that; it wouldn’t be the first time he’d been hunted. He couldn’t think about that right now though. If Bucky was really okay, then they would worry about that. If Bucky was not okay, then it wouldn’t be an issue. Nick Fury wouldn’t have to send men to find him, Steve would go after him first.

“He killed a man the other day,” Steve said. His voice sounded hollow in his own head, emotionless and vague. “I guess he shouldn’t have. I guess I should have stopped him. But he did it to…”

“To protect you,” Clint finished for him when Steve just trailed off. “I know. I did a little reading between the lines when I got the assignment.”

“You were supposed to kill him,” Steve said. He looked up and caught Clint’s gaze, held it. “You didn’t.”

“I made a different call,” Clint said. “It’s not the first time.”

“Thank you,” Steve said.

“Hey, we’re friends,” Clint said. “Friends don’t off each other’s significant others. I think there’s a rule about that somewhere in the handbook.”

“The friendship handbook,” Steve said, mouth quirking in a reluctant smile of amusement.

“Yeah and we’re supposed to be the good guys,” Clint said. “I didn’t sign on to this so I could be a mercenary.”

“You signed on to be a hero,” Steve guessed.

Clint laughed. “Hell no. _That_ just happened.”

Steve picked up Bucky’s hand from the bed and held it between his own. It was the metal one and he felt his cold fingers slowly grow warm at the contact. Bucky’s eyes shifted beneath his eyelids and his fingers clenched briefly in Steve’s, but he didn’t wake.

“I don’t know what to do now,” Steve said. He wasn’t sure if he was talking to Clint, Bucky or himself. “It was better. It was _getting_ better. Now I don’t know what to do.”

“There’s another bed over here,” Clint said, gesturing to where it was near the wall on his side of the room with his foot. “It’s late. I think we all just need to recharge our batteries and sleep on it.”

“I don’t think I can.”

Clint shrugged and closed his eyes again. “Lay down anyway. You might be surprised.”

Steve sat beside Bucky’s bed for a few more minutes, but then he did get up and go over to the other bed. He stretched out on his side and lay there watching Bucky sleep and the heart monitor stab up, up, up with every strong beat of his pulse, comforted by the sight of it and what it signified; life. Before long, Steve’s eyes drifted closed and he did sleep.


	7. Chapter 7

Soft earth outside, water, grass and flowers, trees above that,  
clouds, sky and sun, stars all the way to forever and you somewhere   
in the middle, remembering me where I fell. So I’ll smile when I die,  
no matter what they do to me. I did all I could and nothing less. Over   
my dead body.

_\--[I Wrote This For You](http://www.iwrotethisforyou.me/2009/10/remembrance-of-light.html)_

 

Bucky woke to something soft tickling his face. He brushed at it and it stopped for a little while, but then it started again. In annoyance, he threw his arm out to swat at it.

“No! Oh, my god, Bucky, don’t squash him!”

Bucky winced and opened his eyes to see Pepper standing by his bedside holding a tiny white puff of fur with eyes. It blinked at him, mewed and put a paw out to swat the air in his direction.

“What is that?” he asked. His voice was a parched croak. He licked his lips and found his tongue dry.

“This is Dandy. He’s a kitten,” Pepper said.

Instantly losing interest in Dandy the kitten, Bucky pushed himself up and looked around. He was in a large room with white walls and white and grey spackled tile floors. There were windows along the wall on his right and a small table. There was nothing on the table. On the far side of the table, there was another bed shoved up against the wall and it was empty, but occupied as evidenced by the rumpled sheets and blankets. There was a chair on that end of the room near the foot of the bed. Directly to his left there was another chair, where Pepper had been sitting until she’d had to rescue the kitten from him. On the wall over his head there was a hologram screen with his vital signs on it.

There was an IV in his right arm at the inside crook of his elbow. Bucky plucked it out and flicked it aside then started to sit up.

“Bucky, don’t get up, you’re still hurt,” Pepper said.

“I am fine,” Bucky said. He was stiff from being in the bed for what felt like a long time and his wounds did pain him, but it was not intolerable pain. “Where is Steve?”

“He’s here. I called and they came right back. They’re okay,” Pepper assured him. “Bucky, I really wish you wouldn’t get up. Let me go get the doctor.”

“No, I want Steve,” Bucky said. He started to stand up, but he felt faint and sat back down. “You drugged me,” he accused, eyeing Pepper with a frown.

“The doctor gave you a sedative last night. We were worried you’d hurt yourself,” Pepper said. “Lay back down and I’ll go get Steve for you.”

Bucky didn’t move for a minute, but eventually he decided to do what she asked and got back in the bed. Pepper put the kitten down in his lap and hurried out of the room. Bucky stared down at the tiny kitten and raised an eyebrow. The creature began washing himself, purring, unperturbed.

Steve entered the room a little while later looking like he had been running. “You’re awake,” he said.

“I am going to kill them all,” Bucky said without preamble. “All of them.”

“Ah… I understand why you want to,” Steve said. “I do, really, but I don’t think that’s a good idea. There are a lot of them. There’s only one of you and one of me and it’s just… I get it, Buck. I’m mad about it, too. You nearly died. But it’s just not… it’s not worth it.”

Bucky was not convinced by his argument in the least. He sat back against the pillows and stared at Steve, his anger on low simmer, but more than anger, it was just the logical thing to do. Nick Fury had tried to have him killed exactly as Bucky had predicted he would. It was unlikely that he would stop after a single failed attempt. The probability of Steve getting in the crossfire in such a situation was high. Very high. Higher by far than Bucky was comfortable with. If it escalated, Steve could die and that was unacceptable. As things stood right now, Fury was vulnerable. SHIELD had been shut down and the few agents still out there were either fugitives themselves or under very close watch. It was the perfect time to strike. Yes, he had men at his disposal, which he had revealed by sending a good many of them to kill Bucky, but Bucky was not deterred by numbers. He would kill all of them and walk over their corpses to get to Nick Fury if that was what he had to do to make sure this never happened again.

“I am going to kill them,” Bucky said again. It was a very clear, rational decision. “I’m going to kill _him_. This is unacceptable.”

Steve nodded. “But you’re hurt and you need to get better and Bucky, I just… I don’t want you to die.”

“I will not die,” Bucky said dismissively. Dandy climbed up onto his belly and curled up there, contentedly purring and kneading at his skin with his needle sharp claws. Bucky absently petted his back. “I will not allow this to happen again,” he said.

“The whole mission they sent us on—me and Stark—was a trick to get us away,” Steve said. “So we wouldn’t be here. We couldn’t help. If Barton hadn’t… If he’d shot you, you’d probably be dead.”

Bucky’s lips curved up in a faint smile. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

“I’m so sick of it,” Steve said. He walked over to the chair beside Bucky’s bed and sat down heavily. “I’m tired of being lied to all the time by _everyone_. Because they want something or want me to do something and I wouldn’t do it. So they lie.”

Bucky reached over and took Steve’s hand, placed it over the soft kitten’s back. Steve’s sad and angry expression slipped away into a smile as he pet the animal.

“They manipulate me,” Steve said. “I don’t know what to do, Bucky. What are we going to do now?”

“I’m going to kill them,” Bucky repeated simply, like it was the solution to the entire complicated situation.

“No, you’re not,” Steve said. “Not right now. You’re hurt and I am just…”

“You want to leave,” Bucky realized, surprised by the idea. “You want to run?”

Steve looked up at him through his lashes. “Would that be so bad? Just this time?”

This from the guy who had carried bruises, scrapes and cuts from back alley fights he knew he would lose before he started them most of his young life. The little guy who didn’t think to run because once you started running they never let you stop.

Now he wanted to run.

Bucky pushed himself up in the bed. Steve tried to make him lay back down, but he gestured him away and sat back. “I’m not afraid of them,” he said. “If we run from them, we could be running from them forever. From _him_. He’ll get stronger. They’ll be more powerful; harder to kill.”

“We don’t have to kill anyone,” Steve said.

Bucky made an amused scoffing sound. He passed Dandy the kitten to Steve and leaned a little toward him, though it hurt him to put such pressure on his wounded side. “You know better than that,” he said. “We can run if that’s what you want to do. Hide. But I’m going to kill them one day. I will not make a habit now of running away, _but_ —But I will agree to a strategic retreat.”

“Yes,” Steve said. “Yes, okay. You’re… We can’t fight right now. Not like that. You’re… Well, look at you. You’re hurt.”

“It’s nothing,” Bucky said.

“It’s not _nothing_ ,” Steve said, his voice going sharp. “You were shot. Twice. They sent men—teams—to take you out. To my apartment. They… They lured me away so they could murder you. It’s not _nothing_.”

Bucky pointed at him and a smile passed over his face, there and gone in a moment. “Exactly,” he said. “They lured you away to murder me. You don’t have to run.”

Steve frowned at him and shifted in his seat. “What do you mean?”

“I will run—for now. You stay,” Bucky said.

“What? _No_.”

“Yes. It is the best thing.”

“No it isn’t. I’m not going to let you—”

Bucky turned his head sharply and stared at him, cutting Steve off as completely as if he’d slapped him. “ _Let_ me? No. It is what has to happen. I’ve known it—you have known it—all along.”

Steve stood up, nearly dropping Pepper’s kitten on the floor in his distraction. He set it down on his chair and stood beside the bed over Bucky. For a minute he didn’t say anything, just shifted in agitation, began to pace away from the bed then turned back. “Don’t tell me what I know,” he said, jabbing a finger at Bucky. “If you _knew_ all along then why did you come back to me? You don’t know anything. And you’re not _leaving me here_.”

“Steve—”

“Shut up,” Steve snapped.

Bucky was so unprepared for Steve’s anger that he did. Steve didn’t get angry with Bucky, or if he did, he contained it and hid it from him. It was a measure of how truly upset he was that he did not even attempt to control himself now.

“You don’t get to leave me again,” Steve said. “Not ever. So shut up.”

Bucky narrowed his eyes on him, but after a minute he nodded. “Have it your way.”

Steve stared at him, searching his face looking for a lie. He decided he wasn’t lying and let out a relieved breath. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Bucky rested his head back against the pillows bunched up behind him and sighed. “Guess SHIELD isn’t so dead after all.”

“You really think SHIELD did this?” Steve asked.

“I don’t know,” Bucky said. “I don’t care.”

Steve stood there without speaking for a long time and the silence became awkward and tense. Bucky shifted his gaze to him expectantly, but Steve was looking down, frowning in thought. Eventually, he went back to the chair and picked up Dandy. The kitten mewed at the disturbance but when Steve put him down on the bed with Bucky, he climbed up on him, curled up and began to purr.

“I’ll go and let you rest,” Steve said.

“You don’t have to go,” Bucky said.

Steve nodded. “Still. I’ll go. Besides, I should talk to Sam. If he sees the apartment…”

“Go,” Bucky said. “Tell your friend you’re still alive.”

“Bucky—”

He heard it in the tone of his voice; Steve was about to say something that would be embarrassing for both of them.

Bucky gave him a flat look and cut him off. “Steve,” he said. “Don’t be a twit. We’re over two hundred floors up and the place is on lockdown. Where am I gonna go?”

“I wasn’t—Fine. Okay. I’ll see you later,” Steve said.

He left and Bucky closed his eyes. His right hand went to the sleeping back of the kitten and stroked him and he could feel himself falling asleep. “JARVIS?”

“Yes, sir?” JARVIS immediately replied.

“What’s in this IV drip in my arm?” Bucky asked.

“Saline and a mild sedative at the moment, sir,” JARVIS said. “The exact dose has been calculated to correspond with your unique metabolism, of course, so ‘mild’ in this case is strictly relative.”

In other words, the sedative in his IV was strong enough to knock out a rhino. It explained why he felt weighed down and drowsy.

“Fine,” Bucky said. “Where is Stark?”

“Mr. Stark is in the residence with Miss Potts,” JARVIS said. “Should I relay a message to him for you?”

“Yeah, tell him I want to see him,” Bucky said. “I need him to do something for me if he’s willing.”

“Certainly,” JARVIS said.

While he waited for Stark, Bucky dozed. He was healing rapidly from his injuries, but he was still in pain and healing and not immune to the sedative when it was a continuous drip inside him. He woke when Stark came to stand by the bed and his shadow fell over him.

“You summoned me?” he asked. “I have to say, that’s not something I’m used to. Being summoned. Summoned in my own place by my own… by JARVIS. That is new. Well, not new, but new-ish. Just the other day, Pepper summoned me to the—”

“I need you to do something for me,” Bucky said.

“Yes, JARVIS mentioned that,” Stark said. He had a mug of something steaming in his hand and he sipped it. “That’s not so new. I can’t even begin to list how often people say that to me. Fury needs something. Banner needs something. Romanov needs something. That giant mongoloid with the hammer needs something. Actually no, that one hasn’t happened yet, but you wait. So, Buck Rogers, what can I do for you?”

Bucky just waited him out and when he stopped talking, he said, “We need identification. Passports, driver’s licenses, birth certificates. And money.”

Stark raised his eyebrows. “Money? How much money are we talking about?”

“Fifty-two thousand dollars,” Bucky said.

“That’s very specific,” Stark said.

“Fifty-two thousand, three hundred and twenty-four dollars,” Bucky amended. “It’s at the apartment. In the closet in the blue and grey gym bag on the floor.”

“Ah, I see,” Stark said. “And is that all?”

Bucky thought about it then nodded. “Yes,” he said. “For now.”

“All right. Sounds like fun. I’ll have to get my hands on a hologram machine of some kind, but that shouldn’t be a problem. I can’t go to the apartment though. I wouldn’t make it ten feet through the door.” Stark paced away, paused and looked back at him. “I’ll send Happy. He’ll like that. Any name in particular you’d like?”

“No,” Bucky said. He closed his eyes then snapped them open as he remembered something. “Steve’s sketch book.”

“Pardon?” Stark said.

“It’s on the coffee table—unless it got knocked off. Get that. Steve will want it,” Bucky said.

“Sure, I’ll let him know,” Stark said. “You should go back to sleep though. You hungry? I can get the chef to whip up something. How about pancakes? He makes great pancakes. Or those waffles with the cream cheese filling. There’s this thing he makes, like crème brûlée but then he adds this little pile of caviar in the center and it’s fucking amazing, I don’t mind saying—”

“I will eat a sandwich,” Bucky said.

“A sandwich,” Stark repeated. “You are an odd duck, Barnes. You can have anything in the world you want to eat—within reason, we don’t go in for cannibalism or anything—and all you want is a damn sandwich.”

Bucky’s lips quirked in a tired smile. “A steak sandwich,” he said. “No caviar on it.”

“Ugh, fine, I’ll call it down to the kitchen,” Stark said. “Rogers can bring it in for you.”

“Yes, that would be best,” Bucky said. He wasn’t in the best shape for combat at the moment, but he still slept badly and did not want to wake up and attack Tony Stark. He might be Iron Man, but outside of his suit, he was just a mortal human being. “Thank you.”

“Sure, no problem,” Stark said.

He walked out of the room and Bucky could hear him calling for JARVIS to find him a hologram machine and purchase it at once. Bucky closed his eyes and fell asleep like that, the sedative carrying him right down into the dark where he did not dream.

Sometime later he woke to the sound of Steve’s voice raised in anger. “Did you think I wouldn’t _know_ it was you?! And then what did you think was going to happen?! Did you think I’d just get over it?! Because I wouldn’t have. I _won’t_!”

“I did what I thought was best, Captain,” Nick Fury said, his voice coming in clearly from the intercom across the room where Steve was pacing. “I made the hard decision and did what _had_ to be done, so don’t you—”

“You had _no right_!” Steve said, voice an angry shout.

Bucky lay there watching him glare up at the intercom over his head and didn’t say anything or move to alert him that he was awake and listening.

Fury sighed. “When your dog turns on you, you put it down, Cap. You don’t wait and give it another chance to bite you,” he said, patiently like Steve was a child he was imparting an important lesson to.

Steve’s jaw clenched as he gritted his teeth. “That’s your mistake then,” he said with forced calm. “This _dog_ didn’t turn on you. He never liked you to begin with. He was never _yours_. He bit _you_ , but what the hell did you expect?”

Bucky smiled then had to bite down on a yawn.

“He’s not a dog. He’s not a pet you just decide to put down,” Steve said. “He is a person and he is my _friend_! You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to put him down like he’s some kind of animal because he doesn’t stay in your stupid cage. I am so sick of listening to you people talk about him like he’s—”

“You people—” Fury began.

“I am not finished!” Steve snarled. He took a calming breath, let it out and said, “I am done with you all. If you come after him again, I’ll send your men back to you in pieces. If you come after _us_ , I will kill you. Do you believe me?”

Whether he believed him or not, Fury did not answer the question. “You don’t want to do this, Steve,” he said.

“Actually, I do,” Steve said. “End call.”

The call disconnected before Fury got another word in and Steve turned around. He saw Bucky watching him and approached the bed. “Damn, I forgot for a minute where I was. I’m sorry I woke you up,” he said. “He just… I’m so _mad_.”

“I can tell,” Bucky said. “It’s okay. Are you… all right?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “I’m just mad. God, I can’t believe… I mean, it’s horrible what they did. I’m not wrong about this. I’m _not_. Then he just…”

Bucky put out a hand and rested it on Steve’s arm. Steve turned his hand over and Bucky’s fingers laced through his. “You’re not wrong,” he said.

“Thanks,” Steve said. He smiled and he looked tired himself, Bucky noticed. “Oh, hey, Stark had food brought up for you. I think it’s still hot. The call came through and I got distracted.”

Bucky sat up to eat and Steve sat with him and ate some of the French fries that had come with the sandwich. They didn’t talk and when he was finished, Steve helped Bucky to the bathroom so he could shower and they could check his bandages. He didn’t need to help him walk, but Bucky sensed that doing it was more a comfort to Steve than a necessity and allowed it.

After showering, Bucky crawled back into bed and Steve sat on it beside him. It was getting dark outside and they watched together as the sky went from grey to black and the windows became reflective as mirrors.

“You know, tomorrow we could be completely different people,” Steve said.

“Yes, I know,” Bucky said.

“I’ll have a different name and so will you. I’ll be Calvin or Matthew and you’ll be Henry or Philip or John.” Steve looked down at him and leaned over, smiling, to kiss him. “Maybe I’ll be from Jersey and you’ll be from Long Island. Or I’ll be from Maine and you’ll be from Texas.”

“Texas?” Bucky said doubtfully.

“Probably not Texas,” Steve said.

Steve shifted and got up on the bed, slid a leg over and straddled Bucky. “This could be the last time we’re ourselves for a long time.”

Bucky ran his hands up Steve’s sides, along his ribs and pulled his shirt off. “It could be,” he said.

Steve cupped Bucky’s face in his hands and kissed him deeply. There was a feeling of sadness to him that Bucky didn’t know what to do about. He kissed him back and didn’t try.

“Careful, Rogers,” he said when Steve sat back up a little. “I’m an injured old man. Be gentle.”

Steve laughed. He was blushing, but just a little bit. “Sure, Buck. I wouldn’t want to pop your stitches or anything.”

After sex, which was slower and more gentle than was their habit, Steve lay beside Bucky beneath the covers, curled up against his side. Bucky fell asleep on his back without the aid of any sedation and slept, but he dreamed. He dreamed about the frost and the wind through the mountains. He dreamed about the blurry, indistinct shape of men in lab coats just beyond his vision. He dreamed about the pain of falling and agony of landing. He dreamed about Steve’s fingers reaching out for him but never even coming close to catching him.

That had been a bad winter. Not because of the ice and snow so much as the memory of what Arnim Zola had been doing to him and the fear of what was happening. No one noticed it much, but Steve sometimes seemed like he wondered. He’d thought it was torture and torture Bucky could have handled. He knew what to do in the event of capture and torture. But it was something else.

He dreamed about that ugly little man and he wanted to reach out and crush him so badly that his teeth ached with the desire. It was a purely beastly urge; to bite and tear and kill. There had been others; a man who touched things in a way that you couldn’t ignore, who got inside Bucky’s head and took him away. Far away. Sometimes to greater places, beautiful places, sometimes home. Other times to bad places, dark places, battlefields and dark caverns and the side of Steve’s deathbed. It was so real. That had been the first time Bucky watched Steve Rogers die. Not the last though. He held Steve’s hand and listened to his breath rattle its last in his chest. He sat beside him and watched Steve cough blood and spackled bits of lung into a white handkerchief.

Steve whispered, _I love you_ and _Goodbye_ and _I’m sorry I made such a mess, Buck_ and _I wish I could help it_ and a million other last words to him, every time more vivid than the last. Bucky choked on them and burned them bright in his memory. He began to hate the man who made him see these things and believe them more than he hated the little chipmunk faced doctor.

“Hey, Bucky,” Steve said softly, gently shaking him. “Wake up. It’s okay. It’s just a dream.”

Bucky knew it was a dream and didn’t strike out at him when he came awake. Steve was lying on his arm and he lifted that hand to pet it though his hair. “I know,” he said. “I’m okay. It’s over.”

Steve yawned and turned his face into the side of Bucky’s neck. He kissed him there and sighed out a deep, tired breath. “Good,” he said.

He went back to sleep almost immediately. It took Bucky a little longer, but eventually he slept, too.


	8. Chapter 8

We have not touched the stars,  
nor are we forgiven, which brings us back  
to the hero’s shoulders and a gentleness that comes,  
not from the absence of violence, but despite  
the abundance of it.

_\--Richard Siken_

 

The next day was spent lazily lounging around while Bucky rested and healed and Stark worked on their new identities. Happy had left for D.C. late the previous afternoon to run some sort of errand for Bucky that Steve didn’t know much about and he didn’t return until the next day a little before noon.

Bucky was sleeping while Steve and Clint watched movies on the TV mounted to the wall in their room. The one they were watching when Happy came in carrying a duffle bag over one shoulder was called _The Rocky Horror Picture Show_. Steve didn’t like it very much—it was weird, somewhat scandalous and the music was both awful and annoyingly catchy—but Clint seemed to like it. He tapped his fingers and moved his toes in time to “The Time Warp.”

“The boss told me to bring this here,” Happy said. He glanced at Bucky in the bed and frowned. “Guess I shouldn’t wake him up though, huh?”

“I am not sleeping,” Bucky said, opening his eyes. He looked between Happy and the gym bag and raised his left hand in a beckoning gesture at him. “Here. Let me look.”

Happy went to the bed and unzipped the bag. Bucky looked inside, moved something and removed Steve’s sketch book. “Thank you,” he told Happy.

“You went back to the apartment for that?” Steve asked. He got up to get the sketch book from Bucky. “Thank you,” he told Happy. “But you shouldn’t have. That’s so dangerous. What if they saw you?”

“Nah, I was like a ninja. They never saw me coming,” Happy said proudly.

Steve opened the sketchbook to look inside automatically. There was a drawing of Bucky by the window in his apartment where he would never sit again looking down on the nighttime street below. It was sad to think that he would never again sit in the dark in that spot in the middle of the night with him when neither of them could sleep, not saying a word, Bucky’s face in shadow and the sick yellow light of streetlamps, eyes scanning the sidewalks, following people walking home with his eyes like ants in the dirt. Steve had not first kissed him in that apartment, on that sofa, in that chair, in the bed or standing in that kitchen. He had first kissed him in a room like this one in this building somewhere on the floor they were on or the one above or below it. He had first gone to bed with him in that apartment though, in that bedroom, in that bed and there were a lot of first times encapsulated in that apartment. Steve had always been in love with Bucky, as long as he could remember, but _they_ had fallen in love with each other in that place.

He closed the sketchbook and put that aside. If he had to choose between all of it and Bucky, Bucky would win every time, but he was allowed to be sad about it. “Thank you,” he said again, this time to Bucky, who lay there watching him. “But you really shouldn’t have. It was really dangerous, Happy.”

“Hell, I’m not afraid of those assholes,” Happy said. He glanced over to Bucky and hefted the gym bag. “Where do you want this? This much paper is heavy and I’ve been packing it around a while.”

Bucky snorted in amusement. “Just drop it anywhere,” he said. “It’s not like it’s all in ones.”

“Hey,” Happy said defensively, “we can’t all be super soldiers with steel arms and the strength of twenty men.”

“If you want to trade places…” Bucky said.

Happy set the bag down in a chair near Bucky’s bed. “No, thanks. You’re kind of a miserable bunch,” he said, heading for the door. “Besides, I don’t know if having a metal arm is worth going through having my real arm hacked off.”

“It’s not,” Bucky said.

“What’s in the bag?” Steve asked.

Bucky smiled a little and made an inviting gesture at the gym bag. “Look for yourself.”

Steve went over to the bag and unzipped it. He stared at what he found in surprise. Inside the bag were stacks of money, bills bound with rubber bands. He didn’t know how much it was, but it looked like a lot. “Jeez, Bucky. Where did you…? Did you rob some place?”

“No,” Bucky said.

“Then where’d this all come from?” Steve asked.

“I won it,” Bucky said. “I fought for it.”

“Oh my… That’s…” Steve stopped talking and stared for a moment more. Then he quickly zipped it back up. “How much is that?”

“Enough,” Bucky said. When Steve just stared at him, he said, “About fifty.”

“Fifty what?”

“Fifty grand.”

“Gosh.” Steve shook his head in bewilderment.

“I love this movie,” Clint said randomly. “It’s so weird. So hey, where do you guys think we should go?”

Steve blinked at him. “What do you mean?”

“When we leave here?” Clint prompted. “We can’t go through all this shit then just stay here. So where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” Steve said. He hadn’t even given it much thought. Or any, really.

“It doesn’t matter,” Bucky said.

“Great,” Clint said. He wasn’t annoyed by their answer or lack of planning. He genuinely seemed to think it was great. He went back to watching _Rocky Horror Picture Show_ without another word.

Steve sat back down with him and Bucky soon drifted off to sleep again. After the movie was over, Steve and Clint watched _Rocky_ , which Steve liked a whole lot more. The doctor who had patched Bucky up came by to check on him around two o’clock and he was surprised by how quickly he was healing. Not long after he left, Pepper came to see how they were doing and stayed to watch the end of the movie with them.

“All right, who’s first?” Stark said, striding into the room carrying an array of forged documents. “Rogers, you are now Stephen Abbot. Stephen with a P-H. Here you go.” He handed Steve his new passport, driver’s license and birth certificate. He also gave him a little green card. “Here, and this is a Social Security card. You can’t collect Social Security with it, but it should be fine if you plan on seeking employment.”

Bucky was awake and watching them and Stark went to him next. “You are now James Costello,” he said, grinning. “Congratulations. This is yours.” 

He set the papers down on Bucky’s chest and Bucky picked up the passport to examine it. “Thank you,” he said.

“Sure,” Stark said. He turned and pointed at Barton with the last passport he was holding. “And I haven’t forgotten about you. Come here, Barton. Check this out. You’re gonna love it.”

Clint got up from his chair and took the documents. He read the name on the driver’s license and laughed. “Walter White?” he said. “You’re shitting me. Hell yeah, _I_ am the one who knocks.”

Stark grinned, pleased with himself. “Right?” he said. “And you can absolutely pass as a Walter. I’d believe it.”

“Why is that funny?” Steve asked.

“Don’t worry about it, Cap,” Stark said. “It was after your time. That’s why you’re Abbot and Costello.”

Steve frowned down at his own ID. He hadn’t realized the connection with the names until Stark mentioned it like that. He shrugged and said, “Thanks. For everything.”

“Hey, no problem. That was duplicitous bullshit they pulled. And Austria, really? You drag my ass all the way to Austria, there better be a damn good reason. If there isn’t, well… be ready for the fallout.”

Steve smiled at him. “Thanks,” he said again.

“So did you guys like _Rocky Horror_?” Stark asked, looking around. He had been the one to recommend it.

“Not really,” Steve said.

“I slept through it,” Bucky said.

“Well, fie on you both,” Stark said.

“I like it,” Clint said. “I’ve seen it before, but still. ‘Damn it, Janet!’”

Stark threw out his arms dramatically and sang, “’I love you!’”

Steve grimaced and exchanged a look with Bucky.

“I love the Time Warp dance,” Pepper said. “And that song, it just gets stuck in your head for days.”

“I’m going to do the Time Warp dance right now,” Stark decided. “Who’s with me?”

“I’m leaving,” Steve decided.

Bucky laughed, but he sat up and started to get out of the bed to go with him. When Steve tried to help him, he waved him off. “I’m fine. Come on before they try to make us sing.”

“Aww, you guys,” Pepper said. “Really? It’s more fun with more people.”

They both shook their heads and headed for the door. Before they left, they paused to watch them. They looked foolish, especially Clint who was always so mellow about everything but also so serious. Still, they were having fun, they were with friends and it would probably be a long time before they were all together again like this. Maybe never again. When they left this place this time, they weren’t going home, there was no guarantee that they would return. They would be refugees; outlaws.

Steve sighed and leaned against Bucky a little, his head on his shoulder. Bucky rested his hand on the back of Steve’s neck and gently squeezed. He understood and he might not feel the loss the same way Steve felt it, but he recognized it and understood what was being lost; what Steve had given up for him. It was little enough, this life he’d scraped together for himself out of broken parts, but it was his and he had been comfortable in it, sometimes even happy. He loved these people, his friends; café lunches with Sam, uncertain weekly visits with Peggy. He was going to miss it; it was going to hurt.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky said.

“Don’t be,” Steve said. He turned his head and looked up at him. “I’d do it all again.”

**XXX**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can watch the Time Warp scene from _The Rocky Horror Picture Show_ [here on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkplPbd2f60) if you want. 
> 
> And yes, I am thinking about doing another in this series, but that will be a while in the future.


End file.
